Man who briefly took down North Korea’s Internet posts on r/AMA, some of the questions include:
Would it be possible to hack their internet in such a way that you could have opened a pipeline from their limited NK-only intranet to the outside internet? Or is that so walled off that it wouldn’t be feasible? Giving citizens access to the outside world would be an interesting thing to see them deal with.
To which he answered:
That would be amazing. It’s definitely a huge goal of mine. I’d say it should be possible. But it may be somewhat difficult depending on their setup. From what i’ve seen they aren’t great at setting stuff up, so I’m absolutely going to try!
You allegdedly committed a cyber crime, and we’ve seen “good hackers” get punished for their good deeds before.
Do you have any concerns that you’ll be targeted by authorities?
To which he answered:
Actually the US government was far far more a concern than NK. However now I’ve done work in the space of sort of what they called “guerrilla/unconventional warfare” for folks in the DoD because of this. I’m also working with the folks that would be the ones arresting me and they gave me a nice unofficial commendation (a challenge coin if you’re familiar). I suppose there are other entities that could come after me but I think it’s tough to, I don’t know. But will there be a legal case of “North Korea vs P4x”? Who would take that on even! We don’t even consider NK a country, they’re a terrorist state officially. So I hit back at a bunch of terrorists that attacked me. I probably broke some international shit but 🤷.
Was there anything you learned about NK while you were bringing down the house?
To which he answered:
They suck at Internet. Their internet is little sticks and glue. Even better though, I learned they have only two routers of egress and ingress of the Internet. What I eventually ended up doing was focusing a lot of bandwidth on those routers . It took down all routing into and out of the country. Along with conventional DoS like memory exhaustion and just a lot of bandwidth hitting them, when those two routers came down it was game over.
It wasn’t just a DoS on their infra, it actually took down all routing. The errors people got were “there is no route to host” which was awesome to see honestly!
Those are only some of the comments, those that went against the narrative of “North Korea evil 1984” were expected ly downvoted.
Beware of the real and only master hacker.
So, what is the point of doing such things? I wouldnt dare to do something like that, because it is hard to know which implications this has. I do not want to start a conflict with an entire state. Do they think the western country in which you live will protect you from everything?
He wrote:
What the fuck is he talking about? The DPRK is a country under sanctions and is probably preparing for another war in the Pacific. They have better shit to worry about than some nerd in the Anglosphere who can take out a couple of routers.
Then again, if he seriously can’t think of anything better to do with his time than inconvenience hundreds of innocent people for the lulz, maybe ‘terrorists’ have a good reason for ‘attacking’ him. (Assuming that he was the one who did all of this, which I somehow doubt.)
The “ terrorists that attacked me” comment is what confuses me the most, because what did they do? No, seriously, what did they do for him to say this shit? I highly doubt any North Korean was posing a threat to him, at best maybe someone contacted him to call him an asshole. This is so wild to me. He seems to claim to “care” about the citizens but calls them terrorists anyway. Wild shit.
The guy(in another post i found) got somehow hacked by a script kiddie and then later(I did not understand how) he found out that the hacker was from DPRK, he did link a post to a newsletter covering a wave of attacks by “DPRK hackers”. I did not get a good understanding of his whole charade, but he seems to be just salty that his OPSEC got fucked by a skiddie from “DPRK” lmfao