Obama Promised Revenge and Now North Korea’s Internet Is Totally Down

The U.S. government isn’t commenting, but it is probably more than a coincidence that after President Obama promised a proportional response to the Sony hacking, North Korea’s internet has been knocked down by an attack.

The New York Times reported,

North Korea’s already tenuous links to the Internet went completely dark on Monday after days of instability, in what Internet monitors described as one of the worst North Korean network failures in years.

The loss of service came just days after President Obama pledged that the United States would launch a “proportional response” to the recent attacks on Sony Pictures, which government officials have linked to North Korea. While an attack on North Korea’s networks was suspected, there was no definitive evidence of it.

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Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, an Internet performance management company, said that North Korean Internet access first became unstable late Friday. The situation worsened over the weekend, and by Monday, North Korea’s Internet was completely offline.

On Friday, President Obama promised that the U.S. would respond to North Korea’s hacking of Sony.

The president said, “They caused a lot of damage, and we will respond. We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose. It’s not something that I will announce here today at a press conference.” There is no evidence that the U.S. government is involved, but the attack started on the same day that President Obama promised a response at his press conference.

It is possible that some patriotic Seth Rogen and James Franco fans have taken down North Korea, but the somebody is letting the N. Korean regime know that cyber attacks against American companies and attempted censorship directed towards the American people will not be tolerated. Sony has announced that The Interview will be released, but the studio hasn’t made it clear how the movie will be distributed.

North Korea’s Internet network is small. Most N. Koreans don’t have access to the Internet. The regime, the government, sponsored hackers, state run media, and their propagandists would all be impacted by the retaliation. The DDoS attack on North Korea could definitely be described as “proportional response.” North Korea has never suffered this sort of outage before, and it isn’t a coincidence that their Internet went down just days after the president promised that the United States would respond.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

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Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association