World
North Korea faces major Internet disruption
Seoul: North Korea is facing a major Internet disruption, which could be the result of a cyber attack on the country, according to experts who monitor Internet performance.
“After 24hrs of increasing instability, North Korean national Internet has been down hard for more than 2hrs,” Dyn Research tweeted, according to a CNN report.
The reported outage comes amid an escalating war of words between the US and North Korea over a massive cyber attack on Sony Pictures, over the controversial film, “The Interview”, revolving around a fictitious US plot to assassinate North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.
“Usually there are isolated blips, not continuous connectivity problems. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are absorbing some sort of attack presently,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research.
Matthew Prince, president of CloudFlare, a performance and security company, described the disruption as if “all the routes to get to North Korea just disappeared.
“It’s as if North Korea got erased from the global map of the Internet,” he said.
Prince told CNN that it was well within the realm of possibility that a single individual could be behind the interruption, but said that he could not conclude at this point if an attack was actually taking place.
“If it is an attack, it’s highly unlikely (that) it’s the US. More likely it’s a 15-year-old in a Guy Fawkes mask,” he said.
The US had blamed North Korea for the cyber attack on Sony, which had led to the theft of extensive amounts of proprietory Sony employee data.
The North Korean government, which was outraged by the film’s storyline, claimed to have “clear evidence” that the US government engineered the project as a “propaganda” attack against the country, according to media reports.
However, it has denied being involved in the attack and has called for a joint investigation with the US.
Sony had decided to cancel the Christmas release of the film, in the wake of the cyber attack, amid threats to movie-goers.
US President Barack Obama told CNN Sunday that the hack was “an act of cybervandalism”, but that he did not consider it an act of war.
He had earlier said that the US would “respond proportionally” to the attack on Sony, without giving specifics.
Deputy spokesperson for the US State Department, Marie Harf declined to disclose what the US retaliatory measures would be, reiterating that the US would implement its response. “Some will be seen, some may not be seen,” she said.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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