Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 205 posts

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#51

Post by oasisbob »

yourad_io wrote: post #40

Trying to inform oneself about a technical matter through a mainstream news source is an exercise in frustration. Maybe my English needs work. Could someone with superior English skills to mine, please decipher the article and tell me: Is there any actual evidence of an attack? Has traffic spiked through/from NK? Or could this be them "pulling the plug"? Because the first case is: "Someone attacked NK Internet and br…

Dyn Research (née Renesys) was quoted in the article, and typically posts in-depth articles when this type of thing happens. [1]

Based on the quote[2], I interpret the failure as someone attacking the routers themselves, overwhelming their control planes to the point where they can't sustain BGP sessions reliably.

[1] No post from them yet, would expect it to be at http://research.dyn.com/2014/12/ if/when they do the full write-up.

[2] "Their networks are under duress,” Mr. Madory said. “This is consistent with a DDoS attack on their routers,” he said, referring to a distributed denial of service attack, in which attackers flood a network with traffic until it collapses under the load."

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#52

Post by dev1n »

unreal37 wrote: post #20
eyeareque wrote: post #13

The public /22 (1024 IPs) that is used by North Korea is widely known now, so it is bad form to assume the US is behind this attack. Heck, a 14 year old with a few bots could take down their whole country. This outage won't hurt North Korea. At best it makes for a good head line to see the whole country offline. At worst this means that their elite citizens cannot access social networks or email outside of their coun…

Most likely it's some 14 year old with a small bot network. Or they decided to unplug their router for a week or two to have a bit of a Christmas break from the hassle of maintaining it, since it doesn't harm them in any way.

In support of the idea that it was in fact a 14 year old and not a nation this [1] was posted a few days ago on HN.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777226

edit: I do not mean that what the person who created that website is a 14 year old as it is a very thorough analysis. Just that with this type of information on the internet it is probably pretty easy to construct a bunch of bots to take out the country's connections to the outside world.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#53

Post by digikata »

eyeareque wrote: post #13

The public /22 (1024 IPs) that is used by North Korea is widely known now, so it is bad form to assume the US is behind this attack. Heck, a 14 year old with a few bots could take down their whole country. This outage won't hurt North Korea. At best it makes for a good head line to see the whole country offline. At worst this means that their elite citizens cannot access social networks or email outside of their coun…

Or this could be some kind of reverse false flag operation (a soccer flop?) to give NK a platform to escalate some other negotiation point...

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#54

Post by hn_user2 »

yourad_io wrote: post #40

Trying to inform oneself about a technical matter through a mainstream news source is an exercise in frustration. Maybe my English needs work. Could someone with superior English skills to mine, please decipher the article and tell me: Is there any actual evidence of an attack? Has traffic spiked through/from NK? Or could this be them "pulling the plug"? Because the first case is: "Someone attacked NK Internet and br…

Yeah I caught that too. I interpreted the withdrawn to mean that they stopped advertising any routes for their ip block via BGP. Which could be a pulled plug or a DDOS. I think most likely a DDOS by a random party, but doesn't sound like much actual evidence to any specifics.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#55

Post by Alupis »

lostgame wrote: post #42

Okay, seriously - who else is making the weird, kinda unsettling connection between the recent seizure of the Pirate Bay and this whole 'The Interview' business with North Korea? If the Pirate Bay was still online, would 'The Interview' have leaked already? Is the seizure of The Pirate Bay linked to the intentional suppression of the release of this film? Why would the government raiding TPB concede to do this for te…

While I do agree the timing is bizarre (after all, TPB was in Sweden for 6+ years and how many US takedown/seizure requests were ignored by the Sweden officials, but suddenly now they act?), I don't think it's necessarily related. It sure does make for a good conspiracy however.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#56

Post by [deleted] »

lostgame wrote: post #42

Okay, seriously - who else is making the weird, kinda unsettling connection between the recent seizure of the Pirate Bay and this whole 'The Interview' business with North Korea? If the Pirate Bay was still online, would 'The Interview' have leaked already? Is the seizure of The Pirate Bay linked to the intentional suppression of the release of this film? Why would the government raiding TPB concede to do this for te…

[deleted]

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#57

Post by fleitz »

luftderfreiheit wrote: post #12

What fascinating times we live in. My interpretation of the general history of warfare is that countries agree on restraint once some situation has occurred that all sides agree should never happen again. Mustard gas in WWI, nuclear weapons in WWII... Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.

NK is not going to launch a nuclear attack on the US. The point of NKs weapons is a barrier to entry to invasion. eg. If you attack us Seoul gets nuked. Once they've launched nuclear weapons there is no point in not invading them.

If NK nuked Seoul, in all honesty China would probably nuke Pyongyang long before the Americans, or just send eleventy million troops across the border.

The entire reason NK exists is because China prefers a border with NK rather than a unified Korea sympathetic to US interests.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#58

Post by Monotoko »

jusben1369 wrote: post #33
jmnicolas wrote: post #16

Of course, NK won't be pissed at all and they're not going to retaliate at all (yeah I know it's probably the goal of this attack). This might be the first steps of the first cyber world war for all I know. The only good thing is that only the elite will be affected by the collapse of NK Internet (no porn for a while). The average citizen probably can't even grasp what the net is, and none of her life is linked to it…

Yes can it really be the first cyber war if one side doesn't really have a cyber presence?

The elite do, I imagine this will affect them in a big way. For all we know a few addresses on the public space could also be acting as routes for the private intranet - I imagine they're not completely seperated.

Re: Attack Is Suspected as North Korean Internet Collapses

#60

Post by fleitz »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #49
luftderfreiheit wrote: post #12

What fascinating times we live in. My interpretation of the general history of warfare is that countries agree on restraint once some situation has occurred that all sides agree should never happen again. Mustard gas in WWI, nuclear weapons in WWII... Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross.

>>> Hopefully this doesn't spiral out of control. It's not clear where the boundaries are that we don't want to cross. It's been spiraling out of control for years. I'm actually quite surprised at how restrained our government has been to actually engage some of these rogue countries after decades of ongoing attacks. At some point, you have to return fire. And yes, I'm quite aware the US has been active in several hi…

Restrained?

They invaded the country, and got their asses handed to them by the Chinese. The geopolitical situation is, invade NK, fight the red army.

Post reply on HN