NEWS: North Korea
CONTROLLING THE INTERNET IN THE COUNTRY
A hacker “in pajamas” takes over the Internet

An Amer­i­can hack­er report­ed­ly destroyed the entire North Kore­an inter­net in revenge while “in his paja­mas” for a cyber attack on him by Pyongyang.

It appears that the hack­er — iden­ti­fied only as P4x — launched a num­ber of ‘dis­trib­uted denial of ser­vice’ (DDoS, if you’re aware) attacks on the small her­mit nation, caus­ing the whole world sta­tion­ary coun­try line.

Emails stopped and gov­ern­ment web­sites also stopped working.

Basi­cal­ly, a DDoS com­plete­ly sat­u­rates a sys­tem with bogus traf­fic, which takes up all avail­able band­width, which in turn lim­its the pro­cess­ing capac­i­ty of the web­site’s servers and the site itself comes to a halt.

Due to rules in North Korea, not every­one is allowed to use the inter­net, only a cer­tain num­ber of high-rank­ing offi­cials and academics.

Also, there are not many North Kore­an web­sites avail­able on the wider inter­net that we know of.

Air Koryo, the nation­al air­line, and Nae­nara, a site run by the North Kore­an gov­ern­ment, are just a few of the sites avail­able on the Internet.

So, over the past few weeks, web­sites have come under sus­tained attack from P4x, which even had the pow­ers that be in Pyongyang think­ing the coun­try was under attack from a West­ern power.

Experts had believed that the attacks could have been linked to recent mis­sile tests car­ried out by the North Kore­an mil­i­tary, which caused much con­cern in the region.

How­ev­er — accord­ing to Wired Mag­a­zine — it was not a sleazy arm from anoth­er act­ing state, but “an Amer­i­can man in a T‑shirt, paja­ma pants and slip­pers, sit­ting in his liv­ing room night after night, watch­ing alien movies and eat­ing spicy corn snacks’.