Digital connectivity in North Korea recently took a hit as the country was seen suffering from repeated outages of its few websites. The experts have been trying to figure out the reason behind this for the past two weeks. While fingers were being pointed at state-sponsored attacks on the isolated country following its recent missile testing, it turns out, it was an individual hacker sitting at his home in the US who took down North Korea's internet connectivity single-handedly.
The story is that of pure revenge, against a previous cyber-attack from North Korea that our protagonist here was the victim of. At the time, a hacking campaign by North Korea had targeted Western security researchers in an attempt to steal their hacking tools and find chinks in their cybersecurity protocols. Among the many targeted, one American took this attack personally and wanted to get back at North Korea's attempts.
Identified as P4x in a recent report by Wired, the American hacker waited for a year to see if the US government responded to North Korea's strike. Seeing that there was no retaliation, P4x decided to revert to the attacks by himself. "If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” the hacker told Wired. To get back at North Korea's hacker group, P4x then launched “denial-of-service” attacks on the servers and routers of North Korea's networks. He had found numerous "known but unpatched vulnerabilities" in the systems that allowed him to launch these attacks. Since then, P4x has managed to automate these attacks on the country's networks. Now he just periodically checks the functioning of his programs meant to disrupt the internet of North Korea, right at his home.
Credits:
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/north-korea-cyber-attacks-a-hacker-he-shuts-down-their-whole-internet-1908311-2022-02-03
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