"Internet of North Korea down again at 15:41UTC. Second blackout since last night's restoration of service," said Dyn Research on its Twitter page on Tuesday, having previously noted that the country's four networks "went dark" for nine and a half hours on Monday.
Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Dyn Research, told the website North Korea Tech on Tuesday, "I haven’t seen such a steady beat of routing instability and outages in KP before," adding that "usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently."
The Washington Post reported that at Monday's press briefing, a US State Department official refused to comment when asked by reporters about the possibility of the US being involved in an attack on the country's internet.
However, the Washington Post quoted US experts on Tuesday who cast doubt on the idea that the US government was responsible. "If the government wanted to do something about this, I would suspect they would do something more targeted toward the leadership rather than just shutting down the network," Eugene Spafford, a professor of information security at Purdue University, told the paper.
The report went on to say that despite Twitter users with links to the Anonymous 'hacktivist' collective making claims of responsibility for a North Korean internet hack, US-based hacking researchers believed that the responsibility was more likely to lie with other US-based hacking groups. According to their investigations, the attacks which were recorded on Monday as being targeted at servers carrying traffic to North Korean websites had their origin in the United States.
