NK News (file photo) | A computer in North Korea, Oct. 7, 2016
More than a dozen North Korean websites were knocked off the internet on Tuesday morning due to a failed software update, according to screenshots obtained by NK News. Websites affected by the outage included the online presence of The Pyongyang Times, the Ministry Of Public Health and at least 14 other sites hosted on the same server, records on the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) showed.
“The fact these websites are hosted on a single server which is liable to be taken offline by such outages shows the lack of care given to North Korea's small online presence,” cybersecurity researcher Junade Ali told NK News. “It also provides an insight into the primitive technology that continues to power North Korea's public internet.”
More than a dozen North Korean websites were knocked off the internet on Tuesday morning due to a failed software update, according to screenshots obtained by NK News. Websites affected by the outage included the online presence of The Pyongyang Times, the Ministry Of Public Health and at least 14 other sites hosted on the same server, records on the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) showed.
“The fact these websites are hosted on a single server which is liable to be taken offline by such outages shows the lack of care given to North Korea's small online presence,” cybersecurity researcher Junade Ali told NK News. “It also provides an insight into the primitive technology that continues to power North Korea's public internet.”
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Nils Weisensee is Director of News Operations at Korea Risk Group and covers cybersecurity for NK Pro. He previously founded information security firm Frontier Intelligence, served as head of operations at non-profit Choson Exchange, and was a reporter for DAPD and the Associated Press.