North Korea suffers second Internet outage

North Korea's Internet was down again on Tuesday, according to monitoring specialist Dyn Research, with the latest blackout coming hot on the heels of Monday's widespread nine-hour outage.
Monday's nine-hour denial of service exposed the vulnerabilities in North Korea's limited web infrastructure just days after Pyongyang was blamed for the cyberattack that crippled Sony Pictures.
The country's Internet problems continued on Tuesday, with reports of another outage. Early on Tuesday Dyn Research tweeted that "North Korea continues its struggle to stay online," and noted another outage at 10:41 a.m. ET. The country's Internet was restored again at 11:12 a.m. ET, although the monitoring specialist said that "connectivity problems continue."
Dyn Research reported late Monday that North Korean websites were back online after a 9 hour, 31 minute outage. The outage came less than a week after the U.S. vowed an unspecified response to a massive hacking attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment over the release of the comedy film "The Interview."
On Dec. 19 the FBI accused North Korea of launching the attack against Sony Pictures.
The White House and the State Department on Monday declined to say whether the U.S. government had any role in North Korea's Internet problems.
Dyn Research notes that nine-hour outages are not unheard of in North Korea given its limited Internet infrastructure.
“It’s a rare event these days when an entire country leaves the Internet,” it said, in a statement. “Even so, when North Korea’s four networks went dark, we were not entirely surprised, based on the fragility of their national connectivity to the global Internet.”
North Korea’s four networks are routed through Chinese telecom giant China Unicom, according to Dyn Research. With around 25 million people, North Korea’s Internet backbone is miniscule compared to other countries with similar populations. Yemen, Afghanistan and Taiwan, for example, have 47, 370, and 5,030 networks, respectively.
Arbor Networks, a network security company, noted 29 attacks on the North Korean government owned and operated sites between Dec. 18 and Dec. 22. These include an attack on Kim Il Sung University, the country’s first university website.