North Korea’s Internet Outage Was In Response to Sony Hack Attack Says United States
In December, 2014 for a full week, the internet services in North Korea were crippled by a outage which was unknown at that time. The United States has admitted to being responsible for the Internet outage in North Korea. It also said that the internet blackout was a revenge for the alleged North Korean hand in the massive hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment by #GOP Guardian of Peace hackers.
North Korea had already alleged that the outage was the handiwork of United States in not so subtle words and even calling President Obama a monkey during that period.
Outage a ‘proportional response’
The North Korean web blackout happened just days after President Obama had stated that there would be a proportional response for the Sony hack attack.
This was the an official response given by spokeswoman Marie Harf by the US State Department at that time :
“As the president said, we are considering a range of options in response. We aren’t going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen. So I can’t confirm those reports, but in general, that’s what the president has spoken to.”
Though there were several flip flops by FBI in the investigations of Sony hack attack, the FBI top honchos were pretty confident that the North Koreans were behind the #GOP hackers. In fact in December, the NSA head had come out in support of FBI theory of North Korean hand in Sony Hack with a analysis of its own.
This week a top United States lawmaker, Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, admitted that the cyber attack was in retaliation for the hack of Sony corporate network.
“There were some cyber responses to North Korea,” McCaul said earlier in his public remarks at the event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. McCaul was then asked if the North Korea Internet outage was one of the responses, he said yes. However he did not categorically agree that the United States was the reason for the outage.
However it doesn’t take much information crunching to add up the two. If the North Korean outage was in retaliation for the Sony hack and it was done with the information of United States, it can be deduced that the outage was done by the United States.
