Who’s Behind The Internet Outages In North Korea, Anyway?

North Korea blamed the U.S. and called President Obama a “monkey” today when the country’s Internet and mobile network went down for the third time this week. However, it’s still not clear who’s behind the Internet outages.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” said the National Defence Commission, North Korea’s ruling body, as reported in Reuters.

Whether North Korea’s Internet was just down or the result of a cyber attack isn’t apparent at the moment. What is clear is that the U.S. government doesn’t want to talk about it. The White House hasn’t commented on the matter and a spokesperson from the State Department told the press in a conference on Tuesday that it would also not be commenting on those reports “in any way.”

The North Korean government has dismissed what it sees as denials of U.S. involvement in the outagaes.

Meanwhile a hacker group associated with Anonymous claimed responsibility for North Korea’s Internet outages on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/TheAnonMessage2/status/547197756482551809

According to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, North Korea’s Internet is fairly fragile and would be easy for anyone to hack. He told CNN, “If it’s an attack, it’s highly unlikely it’s the United States. More like it’s a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask.”

North Korea only has one Internet service provider, connected via China. Some reports put the country at barely 1,000 Internet addresses.

The NDC also criticized Obama for Sony’s last-minute decision to release “The Interview,” a movie depicting the plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“The United States, with its large physical size and oblivious to the shame of playing hide and seek as children with runny noses would, has begun disrupting the Internet operations of the main media outlets of our republic.”

The Obama administration accused North Korea last week of being behind the cyber attacks at Sony Pictures in response to “The Interview.”

Dyn Research posted a tweet late last Monday showing that North Korea’s Internet was back online after an outage that lasted for over nine hours.

Internet of North Korea down again at 15:41 UTC. Second blackout since last night's restoration of service pic.twitter.com/TLI7VOdbi0 — InternetIntelligence (@InternetIntel) December 23, 2014

Dyn posted seven hours later that the country’s Internet was still intermittent. The Internet and 3G mobile service went down again Saturday.

In a separate statement, the NDC also denied having anything to do with the recent attack on a South Korean nuclear power plant.