Yesterday The Democratic People's Republic of Korea suffered an internet blackout that lasted nearly ten hours. In light of the Sony hack, and the now FBI sponsored suspicion that North Korea was behind this hack, much intrigue and suspicion was given to the event into the nature of this outage. As of yet, no concrete answer has surfaced as to the cause of this internet outage, or if any group or nation is responsible for it. Though there are many diverse theories about the origin of this outage.
Earlier today, Twitter user @An0nKn0wledge posted the following tweet, alleging that a group of hackers going by the name Gator League was responsible for bringing down the internet in North Korea:
https://twitter.com/An0nKn0wledge/status/547447859583651840
Confirmed by whom is a question never actually addressed, but it is as of this point the first claim being made in regard to yesterday’s internet outage in North Korea. The Gator League responded to the tweet with a mere smiley face. Which is not in itself an endorsement of the statement, but is certainly not a retraction.
The Gator League is as of now something of an enigmatic group. Nothing as of yet comes up from google when the name is searched. The Gator League has a rather young presence on Twitter as of now. They have about 100 posts as of this writing, the oldest of which is from the 20th of December. But among the first posts by the users, one finds the following from Sunday at 12:54pm:
https://twitter.com/GatorLeague/status/546770820354547712
The timing might work out, as it has been reported that North Korea’s internet disruption began on Sunday and escalated the following day.
Again, this should be taken with a grain of salt. It is difficult to say what form a proper confirmation will take, but until when is issued, the ordeal will remain a mystery.
It has been claimed (though the claim is unsubstantiated) that another hacker group, Lizard Squad, may as well be taking credit for the outage. Yesterday, the group posted a single IP address to twitter, labeling it ‘North Korea Off Button.’ The twitter account has since been suspended.
This story is still continuing, as North Korean internet is now back down.