Key North Korean websites back online after shutdown
Key North Korean websites were back online Tuesday after an hours-long shutdown that followed a US vow to respond to a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang.
The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the US government was responsible for the Internet shutdown in one of the least-wired and poorest countries in the world.
South Korean officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of office rules, said the North's official Korean Central News Agency and the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, which are the main channels for official North Korea news, had earlier been down. But the websites were back up later Tuesday. Among the posts glorifying the ruling Kim family was one about Kim Jong Un visiting a catfish farm.
US computer experts described the Internet outages in the North as sweeping and progressively worse. Jim Cowie, chief scientist at Dyn Research, an Internet performance company, said in an online post that the North came back online after a 9 1/2-hour outage.
Possible causes for the shutdown include an external attack on its fragile network or even just power problems, Cowie wrote. But, he added, "We can only guess."
