Update: 3/28/2013 – 09:11EST – KCNA’s site is back online

WASHINGTON DC – The website of North Korea’s state news outlet Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) has mysteriously been taken offline, just one day after a number of South Korea based news websites focusing on North Korea were themselves the victims of hacking attempts.

Since early this morning visitors to KCNA’s .kp domain website (www.kcna.kp) have been presented with an alert that says, “Service Temporarily Unavailable”. Underneath the alert is a selection of unreadable machine code that could provide further clues to the exact nature of the outage.