North Korea’s Internet outages continue

LONDON (AP) — North Korea’s microscopic corner of the Internet has had a rough couple of days, suffering seven outages in 48 hours, according to one Web traffic monitor.

The mysterious problems have some talking of a retaliatory cyberattack by the United States, which holds Pyongyang responsible for last month’s spectacular hack of Sony Pictures. American officials have fueled speculation with vague denials, but security experts say North Korea’s Internet infrastructure is so skeletal that even amateurs — or a simple glitch — could have brought it clattering down.

“A large city block in London or New York would have more IP (Internet Protocol) addresses than North Korea,” said Ofer Gayer, a security researcher at Redwood Shores, California-based Incapsula Inc.

Even on a good day, Web watchers see less Internet traffic from North Korea than from the Falkland Islands, a South Atlantic archipelago of fewer than 3,000 people, said Gayer. Media companies like Sony easily dwarf the communist country’s web presence.

He said that if the network was targeted by a kind of distributed denial-of-service — or DDoS — attack, the list of suspects is endless.