Just over a year ago, a security expert known as P4x was hacked by North Korean spies.
P4x fell victim to a hacking campaign targeting Western security researchers with the ostensible goal of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities.
Apparently, he managed to prevent these hackers from stealing anything of value, but he was badly attacked and recently P4x has taken action on the matter.
I thought it was the right thing to do. If they don’t see that we have teeth, they will keep coming. I want them to understand that if they attack us, it means that part of their infrastructure will go down for a while.
as explained wiredP4x found vUnpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems which allowed it to launch “denial of service” attacks on the servers and routers on which the few Internet-connected networks in the country depend.
As a result, Virtually all North Korean websites – the country only has about 20 websites – have stopped working, from his airline Air Koryo’s booking website to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for the government of dictator Kim Jong-un.
P4x claims that largely automated its attacks on North Korean systems, periodically running scripts that enumerate systems that remain online and then launch exploits to bring them down.
With the failure of the main routers in the country, not only the access to the country’s websites stopped working, but also also for your e-mail and any other Internet-based services. In practice, there was a total shutdown of the Internet in the country.
As rare as it is for a single attacker to cause an entire country’s Internet outage, it is unclear what actual effects the attacks had on the population. Only a small portion of North Koreans have access to the Internet, as the vast majority of residents can only use the country’s intranet.