In retaliation for a cyber strike carried out against him by North Korean hackers, an American hacker ‘in his jammies’ took down North Korea’s internet.
North Korea’s government-run public-access websites were crippled, and email traffic was slowed, after a hacker known only as P4x conducted a series of ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDoS) attacks.
DDoS assaults flood a system with fictitious traffic, using available bandwidth and restricting server processing capacity, causing a website to become unavailable.
Only a few trusted officials and scholars in North Korea are allowed to use the World Wide Web or browser, and only a few North Korean websites are connected to the wider global internet.
These include the state airline Air Koryo and Naenara, the North Korean government’s official web portal, which disseminates state news and propaganda on behalf of the ruling Communist Party, which is led by Kim Jong Un.
P4x has been attacking these North Korean websites for the past two weeks, leading Pyongyang to believe they were being targeted by a Western power.
North Korean government authorities suspected the hacking were carried out in retaliation for the country’s recent missile testing.
The DDoS attacks, according to Wired Magazine, were not the work of US intelligence services or any of the world’s major cyber powers, such as China, Russia, or even the United Kingdom.
According to the report, the perpetrator was “one American male in a T-shirt, pyjama trousers, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating hot corn snacks.”
‘Periodically walking over to his home office to check on the status of the programs he was running to disrupt an entire country’s internet,’ the magazine continued.
P4x told Wired that he was able to take advantage of flaws in North Korea’s out-of-date operating systems from the comfort of his own home.
‘It seemed like the correct thing to do in this situation.’ It’ll only keep coming if they don’t realize we have teeth,’ he told the outlet. ‘I want them to understand that if they come after us, some of their infrastructure will be down for a while.’
He claimed that his cyber strikes on the state started after Pyongyang unsuccessfully attempted to break into his home network a year earlier in order to gain access to his hacking technology.
He claimed he was able to detect the breach, and that he then utilized a virtual computer to open the file the hackers used in their effort to get access to his network, isolating the breach. Surprisingly, he discovered that the breach was perpetrated by North Korea.
He went on to say that he informed American officials, such as the FBI, about the occurrence, but that they disregarded him. ‘If no one else will help me, I’ll help myself,’ he added.
According to the United Nations, North Korean hackers have targeted 35 countries, stealing an estimated $2 billion from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges.
Hackers from North Korea stole $1 billion from Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016.