North Korea hit by DDoS cyberattack causing internet outages

North Korea experienced significant internet disruptions this week, with over 40 state-managed websites becoming inaccessible for approximately 32 hours. Analysis from the US-based network monitoring firm Kentik suggests the outages were caused by a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack.

Doug Madory, Kentik’s director of internet analysis, noted that multiple waves of traffic originated from countries including Vietnam, the Philippines, and Venezuela. The traffic spikes began around 11:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday. The outages affected critical .kp domain sites, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the state news agency KCNA.

While the DDoS attack is a primary suspect, some security experts cited by South Korean media suggested that North Korea’s unstable power supply could also be a contributing factor. The data analyzed by Kentik does not currently identify the specific perpetrators of the attack.