After the US government pointed the finger at North Korea for the massive cyber attack and leaks over the past few days, President Obama promised a "proportionate response".
That lead many to believe that, after their internet hit the skids for about 10 hours yesterday , the US was fighting back by cutting off the North Koreans from the web and giving them a bit of a headache. Now not even they could get at all those leaked scene from The Interview.
However, according to The Verge, it seems that the likelihood is that it wasn't the US government causing the outage. Using data gathered from Arbor Networks' traffic monitoring project Atlas, which has been looking at denial-of-service attacks on North Korea, they have been happening in waves all week, but yesterday's one was big enough to cause an actual disruption.
They work by flooding a connection with a huge amount of fake traffic that eventually makes it impossible for the real traffic to actually get through, and the stats suggest that was a slightly smaller operation than that being run by a group with more limited resources. Atlas' Dan Holden told The Verge that "much like a real world strike from the U.S., you probably wouldn’t know about it until it was too late. This is not the modus operandi of any government work."
That's not saying that the US won't take some action against North Korea, as a spokeswoman for the State Department said that "We aren't going to discuss [...] publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in anyway except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen".
Via Haaretz.com, The Verge
