North Korea is trying to tighten its control of public executions to stop information about them from leaking to the outside world, a rights group has said
North Korea is trying to tighten its control of public executions to stop information about them from leaking to the outside world, a rights group has said AFP / Ed JONES

North Korea suffered a cyberattack on Wednesday morning causing their internet connection to crash just one day after they conducted a fifth missile test, marking the second incident since Jan. 14, Reuters reported.

Junade Ali, a cyber security researcher in England who was monitoring the situation said anyone who tried to connect to an IP address in North Korea the internet would not be able to route their data into the country. Hours later email servers and some web servers were accessible again.

North Korean web domains were unreachable because North Korea’s Domain Name System (DNS) stopped communicating the routes the data needed to take. The server outages suggested an attack occurred where hackers try to overwhelm a network with high amounts of data.

North Korea is very restrictive when it comes to internet use as less than 1% of people in a country of 25 million are allowed to use the internet. Ali says it’s unusual for multiple websites to go offline simultaneously which indicates the crash was caused by network stress than a power cut.