DPRK gets back on the Internet

US denies being behind short-term outage of several hours, which followed Sony hacker attack

Internet access resumed in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on Tuesday morning after a few hours of outage that came amid bickering between the United States and the DPRK over an earlier cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Problems with Internet access in the DPRK started to emerge on Sunday, with a handful of websites unable to be accessed. On Monday afternoon, Internet connections were lost in parts of Pyongyang, and by about 1 am on Tuesday morning, Internet access had completely broken down.

However, by about 10:50 am, Internet access on computers and 3G networks was back to normal.

A staff member at the Internet management office told Xinhua that the suspension was caused by an "overload operation", denying that the network had been hacked.

US-based Sony Pictures was cyberattacked in late November, which caused huge damage to the underlying system and prompted the company to cancel the Dec 25 release of its movie The Interview, which depicts an assassination attempt on DPRK leader Kim Jong-un.

After the FBI claimed its investigation found "enough information" to conclude that the DPRK was "responsible for" the attack, US President Barack Obama said on Friday that his government would "respond proportionally" to the cyberattack, which he blamed on the DPRK, "in a place and time and manner that we choose".

On Saturday, the DPRK rejected the US accusation and proposed a joint investigation of the hacking incident with the United States.

The DPRK has not commented on the temporary suspension of Internet use.

The US company Dyn, which monitors the Internet infrastructure, said the reason for the outage was not known but could be anything from technological glitches to a hacking attack. Several US officials close to the investigations of the attack on Sony Pictures said the US government had not taken any cyberaction against Pyongyang.

Dyn said the DPRK's Internet links were unstable on Monday before the country went completely offline. Links were restored at 10:46 am Pyongyang time (9:46 am Beijing time) on Tuesday. The possibilities for the outage could be a hardware failure, attacks by individuals, or even by the DPRK itself, experts said.

Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a US company that protects websites from attacks, said the fact that the DPRK's Internet was back up "is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn't caused by a state-sponsored attack, otherwise it'd likely still be down for the count".

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying called on the US and the DPRK to talk to each other about the hacking attack on Sony Pictures.

"We have noted recent US remarks and comments from the DPRK," Hua said. "We believe that the United States and the DPRK should communicate about this" issue.

Xinhua - Reuters