One American Hacker Suddenly Took Down North Korea’s Internet—All Of It

Across the last couple of weeks of January, the Internet in North Korea was observed to be down. The blackout of Kim Jong-un’s internet connectivity, although intermittent, was hugely disruptive with reports suggesting an “attack against North Korean servers took the entire country off the internet.” The timing of these attacks coincided with the latest bunch of missile tests, the internet blackout just mentioned coming the day after the fifth such test took place. It should come as no surprise, then, that suspicion for the takedown fell upon nation states in the west. In particular, the U.S. Cyber Command was thought to be a primary suspect.

So, who did hack Kim Jong-un’s Internet?

But what if it were not a coordinated nation state military response? What if a single hacker, out for revenge, was behind the attacks? Well, guess what, that does indeed seem to be the case. In an interview with Wired magazine an American hacker, identified only as P4x, claims to be person behind the blackouts. Wired has seen the evidence to back up the claims.

According to the Wired article, P4x wanted to send a message to the North Korean government. “I want them to understand that if you come at us, it means some of your infrastructure is going down for a while,” he told Wired.

Revenge is a cyberattack best served cold

The event that sparked all of this was not recent, however. Back in January last year, Forbes reported how North Korean hackers had breached both Microsoft Windows and Google Chrome defenses in order to target U.S. security researchers. So, why did P4x wait a year before then suddenly serving up his cold revenge?

Speaking to Wired he reveals that the original hacking campaign that targeted security researchers had been unsuccessful in his case. However, it did leave him feeling “deeply unnerved” not only by being on the receiving end of North Korean state-sponsored hacking attention but also at the “lack of any visible response from the U.S. government.”

Having taken his time, and in essence performed a penetration test against North Korean internet infrastructure systems, he had all he needed to launch the denial-of-service attacks. These targeted vulnerabilities…