North Korea has reportedly suffered from an internet outage that may have been caused by a cyberattack. According to cybersecurity researcher Junade Ali, the country lost internet access for approximately six hours on Wednesday morning. This marks the second internet outage to strike North Korea over the past two weeks. Ali stated that it was likely the latest outage was the result of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Although servers supporting email were back up and running within a few hours, disruption and downtime continues to impact individual institution’s web servers, including North Korea’s ministry of foreign affairs.

Seoul news site NK Pro reported that log files and network records indicate that websites ending in .kp and hosted on North Korean domains were largely unreachable as North Korea’s Domain Name System had ceased to communicate the routes data packets were meant to take. A similar incident had occurred regarding .nk websites on January 14, according to the media outlet. At the apex of the recent attack, Ali reported that no traffic was being sent to or from the country. He confirmed that although it is common for one server to go offline for a period of time, it is rare to see all web properties go offline at once.

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