Why the U.S. isn't behind the North Korean Internet outage

They only have four externally connected networks and just about a thousand Internet addresses. This means the North taking themselves offline would be easy (a la Egypt) but so would an offshore earthquake (such as what on Dec. 26 2006 to most of East Asia) or a deliberate DDoS. With DDoS attack rates starting to top 400Gb/s, there are few networks in the world that can handle a modern attack, and certainly not a nation with such sickly external connectivity.

Literally, a few kids would be able to pull this off. And most important of all, the four North Korean networks all connect through China. Even if the White House would somehow authorize an attack against the Pyongyang Internet, there’s very little likelihood President Obama would approve such an assault on Chinese sovereignty for such minuscule and fleeting national security returns.

It is entirely possible this is good old American patriotic hackers, mimicking the Jester, or Anonymous looking to strike back against North Korea. If so, then the Department of Justice must do like it did at the time of Iraq invasion in 2003 and warn them that the US government “does not condone so-called ‘patriot hacking’ on its behalf.”