[imagesource: Ed Jones / Getty Images]

Kim Jong-Un loves a spot of horse riding.

Just look at him tearing around on horseback in North Korea’s latest propaganda film, The Great Year Of Victory, 2021.

It’s just nice to see him happy, you know, after he’s sacrificed so much for his people.

To take on one of the world’s most repressive regimes you have to have some serious cojones, and an American hacker who goes by P4x clearly does.

He’s the focus of a great WIRED story titled ‘North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet’. It deals with how he’s taken his revenge on North Korean spies who hacked him just over a year ago:

P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally—and by the lack of any visible response from the US government.

He waited, and waited, but there was no show of strength from his government.

North Korean cybercriminals have targeted South Africa before. I imagine our response was similar.

Eventually, P4x grew resentful and decided to take matters into his own hands:

“It felt like the right thing to do here. If they don’t see we have teeth, it’s just going to keep coming,” says the hacker…

P4x says he’s 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.

His success has been easy enough to spot, given that North Korea only operates a few dozen websites. Across a number of days, almost all of them dropped offline at different times.

These include the national airline carrier Air Koryo as well as Naenara, a site that operates as the official portal for Kim Jong-un’s government.

At one stage, he even paralysed at least one of the country’s key central routers, essentially cutting them off digitally from the rest of the world.

Given North Korea’s recent missile testing it was assumed that a foreign government may have used hackers to send a message.

Here comes a passage sure to enforce stereotypes:

In fact, 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.

Mom, the meatloaf!

You can read the in-depth technical stuff regarding his hacking prowess here.

In the end, P4x says, “I just want to prove a point. I want that point to be very squarely proven before I stop.”

Now that this is out in the open, North Korea’s response will be very interesting.

[source:wired]