Sole American Hacker Took down N.Korea's Internet

February 04, 2022 12:50

A lone disgruntled American hacker identified only as "P4x" was behind the breakdown of all online traffic in North Korea for six hours on Jan. 26, U.S. magazine Wired said Wednesday.

The websites that were brought down by his distributed denial-of-service attack included "Naenara," the official portal for the North Korean government, and the websites of the Foreign Ministry, the official Rodong Sinmun, the Korean Central News Agency, and Air Koryo.

According to Wired, P4x is an independent hacker who does not belong to any agency. 'It was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks -- and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country," the magazine wrote.

P4x claims he was hacked by North Korean spies in late January 2021 and never offered any real help from the U.S. government to assess the damage, nor did he ever hear of any open investigation. "It began to feel… like 'there's really nobody on our side,'" he told the magazine.

"His cyberattacks on North Korean networks are, he says, in part an attempt to draw attention to what he sees as a lack of government response to North Korean targeting of U.S. individuals," Wired added. "If no one's going to help me, I'm going to help myself," P4x said.

P4x told the magazine he found "numerous known but unpatched vulnerabilities in North Korean systems that have allowed him to singlehandedly launch 'denial-of-service' attacks on the servers and routers the country's few internet-connected networks depend on."

He hopes to "recruit more hacktivists to his causes with a dark website he launched Monday called the FUNK Project," for "FuckyoU North Korea."

© This is copyrighted material owned by Digital Chosun Inc. No part of it may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission.