US hacker ‘in his pyjamas’ takes down North Korea’s internet

An American hacker ‘in his pyjamas’ has taken down North Korea‘s internet in revenge for a cyber attack carried out against him by Pyongyang.

The hacker, who has been named only as P4x, launched repeated ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks against the communist state, crippling the country’s few government-operated public-access websites and slowing email traffic.

DDoS attacks flood a system with fake traffic, consuming available bandwidth and limiting processing capacity of servers so that a website becomes unavailable.

In the isolationist state, just a small number of trusted officials and academics are permitted to use the World Wide Web. At the same time, only a small number of North Korean websites are connected to the wider global internet.

These include state airline Air Koryo and Naenara – the official web portal of the North Korean government – which spreads state news and propaganda on behalf of the Communist Party, headed by Kim Jong Un.

Over the last two weeks, these websites have come under a sustained attack from P4x, even tricking observers of North Korean activity into believing the country was facing cyber attacks from a Western power.

Experts suspected the hacks were being done in response to a recent spate of missile tests that have been carried out by Pyongyang, of which there have been six in recent weeks, raising alarm bells in the region and drawing condemnation.

But according to Wired Magazine, the DDoS attacks were not the work of the intelligence agencies of any of the world’s big players.

Instead, ‘one American man in a T-shirt, pyjama pants and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks,’ was responsible, the magazine wrote, ‘periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.’