> An illustration picture shows a projection of binary code on a man holding a laptop computer, in an office in Warsaw June 24, 2013<p>That's not at all what I imagined Warsaw looking like.
> websites on North Korean web domains were largely unreachable because North Korea’s Domain Name System (DNS) stopped communicating the routes that data packets should take.<p>BGP, not DNS, communicates routes. If Reuters is getting basic IT factchecking wrong, I wonder how many errors are in articles about topics I know nothing about.
> Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher in Britain who monitors a range of different North Korean web and email servers<p>How would a researcher keep tabs on NK infrastructure like this? Would it be pinging known IPs for uptime?
NK News has more details and some speculation about possible attackers: <a href="https://www.nknews.org/2022/01/north-korea-kicked-off-internet-by-suspected-ddos-attack/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nknews.org/2022/01/north-korea-kicked-off-intern...</a>
Totally wild speculation: NK is assisting Russia with cyber warfare leading up to the imminent Ukraine invasion, and someone in "the west" is taking them offline to reduce the effectiveness.
Extremely dangerous to attack North Korea's civilian communications, which are largely the same as their military's. Depending on the impact, it could confuse leadership into thinking a decapitation strike is underway.<p>edit: A specific example I was thinking of is the DPRK's civilian cell phone network, Koryolink (particularly this subsection under "Nuclear Crisis Communications"):<p>><i>"If North Korean leaders rely on the country’s cellular network for crisis communications, there is a real chance of interruptions in network service during a crisis, and they might be misinterpreted as a cyberattack against North Korea’s nuclear forces. While North Korean “special users” have their own dedicated channel, it appears to operate on the same network infrastructure, using the same towers and the same base stations."</i><p><a href="https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/does-kim-jong-uns-phone-give-a-window-into-north-korean-command-and-control/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/does-kim-jong-uns-phon...</a>