North Korea's internet links restored: US monitoring company

North Korea’s internet links have been restored, but it is not clear how stable they are, the U.S.-based internet monitoring company Dyn has said.

“The question for the next few hours is whether it will return to the unstable fluctuations we saw before the outage,” Jim Cowie, chief scientist for the company, said in a telephone call.

North Korea has been experiencing sweeping and progressively worse Internet outages. One expert had claimed that the country’s online access is “totally down.”

Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, which detected the North Korean Internet outage, said: “For the past 24 hours North Korea’s connectivity to the outside world has been progressively getting degraded to the point now that they are totally offline.

“There’s either a benign explanation - their routers are perhaps having a software glitch; that’s possible. It also seems possible that somebody can be directing some sort of an attack against them and they’re having trouble staying online,” he had said.

Several U.S. officials close to the investigations of the attack on Sony Pictures said the U.S. government was not involved in any cyber action against Pyongyang.

Dyn Research said the reason for the disruptions was not known but could range from technological glitches to a hacking attack. North Korea has denied it was behind the cyberattack and has vowed to hit back against any U.S. retaliation.

The hackers said they were incensed by a Sony comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which the movie studio has now pulled from general release.

On the other hand, South Korea has also not ruled out the involvement of North Korea in a cyberattack on the country’s nuclear power plant operator and has requested the United States to help in investigations, an official involved in the proceedings has disclosed.

Reuters