In what appears to be a revenge attack, a hacker has left the entire North Korea without internet in a blackout that left the hermetic country without service for several continuous days; what seems like a movie story has happened a few months ago and the story is just as interesting as it is fascinating.
If this is interesting to you and you want to know more about what happened, do not hesitate to continue reading to know more details about it.
A story of revenge from a hacker
It all happened at the end of January this year, the entire North Korean internet network was completely shut down for several days; a country that is already completely isolated from the world and only a sector of the government has access to this type of connection.
As always, the regime thought that it was an attack by one of the enemy governments trying to steal information about their missiles, but this was far from reality.
The attack was orchestrated by a single person, an American hacker who achieved the feat, as revenge for something the Asian country had done to him.
And it is that the subject in question suffered a personal attack from other North Korean crackers, who focused on cybersecurity objectives to steal information and violate United States systems; something that did not sit well with the hacker and therefore he began to plan his large-scale attack.
Quite a feat accomplished by one person
This hacker with great experience, managed to avoid the hack that they tried to do and prevented them from entering his system, and they were not able to take anything precious, although they were about to do it.
Seeing that the government did not decide to do anything, he began to plan his own personal attack against these subjects. Though it would soon become something bigger, he decided he would bring down North Korea's entire internet network in revenge.
In the beginning, he began to investigate North Korean systems and found many vulnerabilities that were easy to exploit; since this country is a bit behind in the aspects of computer security and software patching. For this, he decided to start with a denial of service or DDos attack; where through multiple requests he could crash the servers of the internet networks of this country on his own.
How was the hacker attack orchestrated?
One of the methods applied was this DDoS attack, however, the hacker did not reveal what the vulnerabilities were so that the government would not know what they were and could fix them. After doing this, he used scripts that automate the attacks and launch exploits on the systems at a given time. This left the North Korean network completely vulnerable; causing them to lose control of their networks for several days.
However, it must be taken into account that North Korea has a strong restriction on internet access, since it does not allow its citizens to connect to it and only has a private intranet where only certain sectors of the regime can access. So it is not so far-fetched to think that a single person could have achieved this feat, causing every website with a domain in the country to stop working during the time the attack lasted.
A story of drama and revenge in real life
There are few times that you can see a movie story like this outside of fiction and everything seems to indicate that the American hacker achieved his long-awaited revenge in style and with resounding success.
Despite this, doubts remain about the possible consequences to his person and how the North Korean government could return the attack in some way or worse, start some kind of conflict with the United States for taking things even further.
For this reason, many of these cyber attacks do not come to light, since they have a significant impact on relations between countries, and can even cause a war if some sensitive fibers are touched.
It only remains to be seen if the revenge of this anonymous hacker will end in a unanimous victory or if there will be a continuation in this story between an entire nation against a single person.
This shows how vulnerable North Korea's internet networks are because of their political secrecy.
Consequences for the American hacker
Everything seems to indicate that the actions of this hacker, known by the pseudonym of P4X, despite having violated several laws in his country, have passed without major consequences, this possibly because he is working in some way with the US government and this gave a free pass since the scope of the attack was not that wide due to North Korea's restriction of its internet to citizens.