China denies it cut off internet access in North Korea

Country’s sole internet link to the outside world is through China

Following North Korea experiencing a complete Internet outage, Lim Jong-In, the Dean of Korea University Graduate School of Information Security says he believes the outage to be "the United States taking revenge". Video: Reuters

Reports that China was involved in cutting off North Korea’s internet are “irresponsible“, China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.

Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the remarks at a daily news briefing. China called on the United States and North Korea to talk to each other about the hacking attack on Sony Pictures, she said.

“We have noted recent US remarks and comments from North Korea,” Hua said. “We believe that the United States and North Korea should communicate about this (issue).”

The United States has blamed Pyongyang for the hacking attack on Sony. The United States has also asked China to identify any North Korea hackers operating in China and, if found, send them back to North Korea.

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North Korea experienced a complete internet outage for hours before links were restored on Tuesday, a US company that monitors Internet infrastructure said. The country’s sole internet link to the outside world is through China.

Several US officials close to the investigations of the attack on Sony Pictures said the US government was not involved in any cyber action against Pyongyang.

If someone did just knock North Korea off the internet for half a day, it wouldn’t have taken much. With barely 1,000 internet addresses, one internet service provider and one connection to the outside world via China, North Korea’s cyberlinks are negligible - barely one per cent of that of Afghanistan, a similarly impoverished country with a roughly comparable population.

By the same token, closing down the links wouldn’t have had much of an effect within North Korea. For internal online communications it uses a closed intranet network, but that was apparently not affected, according to officials across the border in the South.

North Korea is “one of the least connected countries in the world,” said Matthew Prince, CEO of US-based CloudFlare, which, among other services, protects websites against web-based attacks.

It's also one of the most vulnerable, said Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn, a US-based Internet performance company.

“North Korea, historically, is fairly fragile,” he said after internet access to North Korea was restored on Tuesday.

Internet links to the country remained snapped for serveral hours, but Mr Cowie said the country had experienced outages of similar length this year.

Reuters