An American hacker who spends his nights watching movies from the series Alien and eating chips carried out a distributed denial of service cyberattack known by its acronym in English as DDoS and that took several North Korean Internet sites offline.
The attack, the hacker said, was in retaliation for a cyberattack that North Korean spies carried out against him in 2021.
According to a report on the Wired portal, the American hacker identified as P4x attacked North Korean internet servers in mid-January. His attack affected everything from the reservation site of the state airline Air Koryo to Naenara, a page that is used for the distribution of propaganda of the supreme leader Kim Jong-un.
The hacker said the attack from North Korea was part of a campaign against Western cybersecurity researchers and was aimed at stealing tools to find security vulnerabilities.
Annoyed that the attack was not answered by US cybersecurity agencies such as the US Cyber Command, P4x took action and DDoSed against North Korean servers.
“I felt it was the right thing to do. If they don’t see that we have teeth, they will keep attacking,” P4x said.
The hacker explained that he took advantage of several known vulnerabilities in North Korean systems. However, for security reasons he refused to release details of these.
Asked about the scope of his attack and the possibility that it would affect the North Korean civilian population, P4x said that his intention was only to make the Pyongyang regime uncomfortable. “I definitely wanted to affect the people as little as possible and the government as much as possible,” he noted.
A researcher from the Stimson Center specializing in North Korea validated the hacker’s position, saying that the vast majority of the North Korean civilian population only has access to an intranet, that is, to a kind of closed internet controlled by the regime.
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