North Korea is blaming South Korea as well as the United States for an INternet outage that lasted for two days in that country.
The outage that took place on Wednesday and Thursday was noticed world-wide. Any attempts to access any site with the suffix dot kp was unsuccessful for two days.
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North Korea pointed out that the outage coincided with the military games taking place between South Korea and the United States. South Korea denies any connection to the disruption of service to North Korea. The United States military declined to comment.
South Korea does not allow its citizens to access North Korean sites at any time. Access to the North is blocked in South Korea and disseminating any or re-posting any material from North Korea is a crime.
Internet connectivity in North Korea is limited to only a select few, the large majority of North Koreans do not have access to the Internet. Of the very few that have access to the Internet, even fewer have access to the Internet that we have come to recognize. Much of the content available there is limited only to North Korean sites publishing government propaganda.
South Korean Security experts are leery of North Korean claims that the South and the United States were involved, saying that in tracking cyberattacks, it generally takes months to determine the source. Additionally, Lim Jong-in, dean of Korea University’s Graduate School of Information Security in Seoul says that individual hackers in China have much more information on North Korean Internet and computer software than either the U.S. or South Korea and so is more likely to blame for the interruption.