Did a peeved American hacker singlehandedly take down the web in North Korea? That’s the story, in accordance with a recent article from Wired.

In mid-January, the Hermit Kingdom started struggling a sequence of mysterious web outages, the likes of which culminated on Jan. 26 with a near-total web blackout. At the time, it was widely speculated that the outages have been the results of cyberattacks, although it wasn’t clear who might need been doing the hacking.

Well, Wired now reports {that a} pseudonymous hacker, recognized solely as “P4X,” is taking the credit score. The self-described cyber vigilante claims to have taken it upon himself to hack the communist dictatorship after he, himself, was focused by among the nation’s hackers earlier this 12 months.

In January, a report from Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) revealed an “ongoing” hacking marketing campaign focusing on safety researchers concerned in vulnerability analysis and improvement. The marketing campaign, attributed to a “government-backed entity based in North Korea,” was an obvious effort to steal each analysis and instruments.

P4X, who counts himself among the many unfortunate crowd focused by the marketing campaign, stated that he was contacted by the FBI after getting hacked however finally discovered the federal government’s response unsatisfactory. He subsequently determined to take issues into his personal palms. What did he do? Exploit vulnerabilities within the authoritarian nation’s programs to launch “denial-of-service” assaults on the servers and routers that assist its networks. Those assaults supposedly helped to push all of North Korea’s web sites off the web for a interval of roughly six hours final week.

You’d be forgiven for being barely doubtful of those claims however, in accordance with information seen by Wired, it appears to be legit. The outlet stories that display screen recordings offered by the hacker, in addition to analytics of NK’s net exercise throughout the supposed assaults, appear to substantiate the claims. The outlet stories:

Records from the uptime-measuring service Pingdom present that at a number of factors throughout P4x’s hacking, nearly each North Korean web site was down. (Some of those who stayed up, just like the information website Uriminzokkiri.com, are based mostly outdoors the nation.) Junade Ali, a cybersecurity researcher who displays the North Korean web, says he started to watch what seemed to be mysterious, mass-scale assaults on the nation’s web beginning two weeks in the past and has since carefully tracked the assaults with out having any thought who was carrying them out.

Granted, most North Koreans don’t actually have access to the web, so a majority of the nation seemingly didn’t discover this occasion in any respect. But P4X has asserted that this was all about sending a message to the North Korean authorities, not the poverty-stricken inhabitants that lives beneath it. “I definitely wanted to affect the people as little as possible and the government as much as possible,” he instructed Wired.

P4X has additionally apparently launched a website on the darkish net, dubbed the FUNK Project, or the “FU North Korea” challenge, the place he’s seeking to recruit different hacktivists to his trigger. If you will have the required skillset and the cajones to throw down towards Kim Jong-un, he’s in all probability on the lookout for your assist.