Entire North Korea Suffers from Internet Outage!

UPDATE:

After more than nine hours and 30 minutes, Internet service has been restored in North Korea,according to technology news service Dyn Research. Access is only partial, Reuters reports, but the country's main news service and newspaper both are back online.

ORIGINAL:

North Korea's Internet is offline — days after President Obama pledged a "proportional response" to the communist country's alleged hacking of Sony Pictures, multiple news reports say.

Doug Madory, the director of Internet analysis at Dyn Research, told The New York Times and other news organizations that North Korea's Internet access became unstable late Friday. By Monday, it was offline, he said.

San Francisco-based CloudFlare, a network and security company that monitors global Web access, told The Times that North Korea's Internet access was "toast."

It's unclear what caused the outage, but State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said today: "We aren't going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen."

In an interview with NPR's Elise Hu, Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare, pointed to four possible scenarios: North Korea turned off its own Internet; China's upstream provider turned it off; the country's routers failed at an unfortunate time; or it was the result of a denial-of-service attack from either a hacking group or the U.S. Prince said he thinks it's unlikely the U.S. was behind the reported outage.

North Korea has one of the lowest Internet penetrations in the world — with access limited mostly to the country's elite. The U.S. has linked the recent hacking of Sony Pictures to North Korean hackers, though North Korea itself has denied it is responsible — even though it called the act righteous. (Some computer security experts have questioned whether Pyongyang is behind the hack.)

Threats against moviegoers and theaters attributed to the group that claimed responsibility for the hack were behind Sony's decision last week to cancel the planned Christmas Day release of The Interview, a comedy that centers on a plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

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By: fdfffs On 10:22

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Password changing dance starts now: eBay accounts data compromised

If you have an eBay account, it's time to change your password. The company released a statement today saying their internal and customer databases were compromised earlier this year, and starting today they'll prompt everyone to change their passwords.

Attackers made off with names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and of course, encrypted passwords. eBay explained that financial info like credit card numbers and other sensitive data (like PayPal accounts) are kept in a separate encrypted database which wasn't compromised. They also said they've found no evidence of unauthorized access or activity by registered eBay users—which is code for "we don't think anyone's used these passwords yet." According to the statement, intruders compromised employee accounts first, and used their access to get the data they really wanted. They discovered the breach about two weeks ago, but the actual attack took place back in late February and early March.

To change your eBay password, log into your account, then click your name in the upper left corner. Select Account Settings. Click "Personal Information" on the left side of the page, and "edit" next to your password.

As always, if you use the same password on multiple sites, first, change those too, and second, stop using the same password on multiple sites. Instead, use a password manager that generates and remembers strong passwords for all the sites you use around the web.

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By: fdfffs On 21:15

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