North Korea’s Internet links restored amid U.S. hacking dispute

As the internet saga between US, Sony and North Korea continues ,North Korea experienced a complete Internet outage for hours before links were restored on Tuesday, but U.S. officials said Washington was not involved.

U.S.-based Dyn, a company that monitors Internet infrastructure, said the reason for the outage was not known but could range from technological glitches to a hacking attack. Several U.S. officials close to the investigations of the attack on Sony Pictures said the U.S. government had not taken any cyber action against Pyongyang.

U.S. President Barack Obama had vowed on Friday to respond to the major cyberattack, which he blamed on North Korea, “in a place and time and manner that we choose.”

Dyn said North Korea’s Internet links were unstable on Monday and the country later went completely offline. Links were restored at 0146 GMT on Tuesday, and the possibilities for the outage could be attacks by individuals, a hardware failure, or even that it was done by North Korea itself, experts said.

Matthew Prince, CEO of U.S.-based CloudFlare which protects websites from web-based attacks, said the fact that North Korea’s Internet was back up “is pretty good evidence that the outage wasn’t caused by a state-sponsored attack, otherwise it’d likely still be down for the count”.

Almost all of North Korea’s Internet links and traffic pass through China and it dismissed any suggestion that it was involved as “irresponsible”.

Meanwhile, South Korea, which remains technically at war with the North, said it could not rule out the involvement of its isolated neighbor in a cyberattack on its nuclear power plant operator. It said only non-critical data was stolen and operations were not at risk, but had asked for U.S. help in investigating.

South Korean President Park Geun-hye said on Tuesday the leak of data from the nuclear operator was a “grave situation” that was unacceptable as a matter of national security, but she did not mention any involvement of North Korea.

North Korea is one of the least-connected nations in the world, and the effects of the Internet outage would have been minimal.

Very few of its 24 million people have access to the Internet. However, major websites, including those of the KCNA state news agency, the main Rodong Sinmun newspaper and the main external public relations company went down for hours.

“North Korea has significantly less Internet to lose, compared to other countries with similar populations: Yemen (47 networks), Afghanistan (370 networks), or Taiwan (5,030 networks),” Dyn Research said in a report.

“And unlike these countries, North Korea maintains dependence on a single international provider, China Unicom.”

NO PROOF, CHINA SAYS

The United States requested China’s help last Thursday, asking it to shut down servers and routers used by North Korea that run through Chinese networks, senior administration officials told Reuters.

The United States also asked China to identify any North Korean hackers operating in China and, if found, send them back to North Korea. It wants China to send a strong message to Pyongyang that such acts will not be tolerated, the officials said.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Monday it opposed all forms of cyberattacks but there was no proof that North Korea was responsible for the Sony hacking.

North Korea has denied it was behind the cyberattack on Sony and has vowed to hit back against any U.S. retaliation, threatening the White House and the Pentagon..

The hackers said they were incensed by a Sony comedy about a fictional assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which the movie studio has now pulled from general release.

China is North Korea’s only major ally and would be central to any U.S. efforts to crack down on the isolated state. But the United States has also accused China of cyber spying in the past and a U.S. official has said the attack on Sony could have used Chinese servers to mask its origin.

Source: Reuters

WoW ! Found body believed to be actress Misty Upham

Here is the new development of the whereabouts of the missing Actress Misty Upham, family and friends combed the whole forest where her purse and I’d was found, checkout bellow the complete report from ABC News

“Police in Washington state believe they have found the body of missing actress Misty Upham, according to multiple reports, including The Seattle Times.
The Times quoted police spokesman Steve Stocker saying there was a “good chance” the body found near the White River in Auburn, Wash., was Upham’s.

Police told The Times that the body was found at the bottom of a 150-foot embankment not far from the river.
Television station KIRO-FM reported that a search party of three, including one family member, was canvassing the forest when they found Upham’s purse and ID. They searched a ravine, discovered a body and called 911.

An official identification of the body has not been made. The King County Medical Examiner’s office said no information would be released until Friday afternoon.
Upham, who is known for her roles in August: Osage County and Frozen River, was reported missing by her parents on Oct. 6.

The 32-year-old Native American actress has been listed as missing in the Washington Crime Information Center database. Upham’s father, Charles Upham, wrote on her Facebook page on Oct. 12 that “Misty has suffered from mental illness most of her life. With the help of her medical team and family support she is able to manage it well.”

The family said Upham had moved to the Seattle area to help care for her father, who is recovering from a stroke.
“When Misty left California state her medical team stopped her treatment and told her to re-establish treatment and medication in Washington state,”
Charles Upham wrote on Facebook. “This has not been a smooth transition.”

He ended the Facebook post with an appeal directly to his daughter: “Misty, if you can see this message, we love you and your family will continue to search
for you until you are found. Come home please.”

WoW ! It’s HerexG

WoW ! Boko Haram Not Sponsored By Anti jonathan

When Washington imposed sanctions in June 2012 on Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau,he dismissed it as an empty gesture. Two years later, Shekau’s skepticism appears well founded: his Islamic militant group is now the biggest security threat to Africa’s top oil producer, is richer than ever, more violent and its abductions of women and children continue with impunity.

As the United States, Nigeria and others struggle to track and choke off its funding, Reuters interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials who closely follow Boko Haram provide the most complete picture to date of how the group finances its activities.

Central to the militant group’s approach includes using hard-to-track human couriers to move cash, relying on local funding sources and engaging in only limited financial relationships with other extremists groups. It also has reaped millions from high-profile kidnappings.

“Our suspicions are that they are surviving on very lucrative criminal activities that involve kidnappings,” U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Linda Thomas-Greenfield said in an interview. Until now, U.S. officials have declined to discuss

Boko Haram’s financing in such detail.
The United States has stepped up cooperation with Nigeria to gather intelligence on Boko Haram, whose militants are killing civilians almost daily in its northeastern Nigerian stronghold. But the lack of international financial ties to the group limit the measures the United States can use to undermine it, such as financial sanctions.

The U.S. Treasury normally relies on a range of measures to track financial transactions of terrorist groups, but Boko Haram appears to operate largely outside the banking system. To fund its murderous network, Boko Haram uses primarily a system of couriers to move cash around inside Nigeria and across the porous borders from neighboring

African states, according to the officials interviewed by Reuters. In designating Boko Haram as a terrorist organization last year, the Obama administration characterized the group as a violent extremist organization with links to al Qaeda.

The Treasury Department said in a statement to Reuters that the United States has seen evidence that Boko Haram has received financial support from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb (AQIM), an offshoot of the jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden.

But that support is limited. Officials with deep knowledge of Boko Haram’s finances say that any links with al Qaeda or its affiliates are inconsequential to Boko Haram’s overall funding.

“Any financial support AQIM might still be providing Boko Haram would pale in comparison to the resources it gets from criminal activities,” said one U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Assessments differ, but one U.S. estimate of financial transfers from AQIM was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars.That compares with the millions of dollars that Boko Haram is estimated to make through its kidnap and ransom operations.

LUCRATIVE KIDNAPPING RACKET
Ransoms appear to be the main source of funding for Boko Haram’s five-year-old Islamist insurgency in Nigeria, said the U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

In February last year, armed men on motorcycles snatched Frenchman Tanguy Moulin-Fournier, his wife and four children, and his brother while they were on holiday near the Waza national park in Cameroon, close to the Nigerian border.

Boko Haram was paid an equivalent of about $3.15 million by French and Cameroonian negotiators before the hostages were released, according to a confidential Nigerian government report later obtained by Reuters.

Figures vary on how much Boko Haram earns from kidnappings. Some U.S. officials estimate the group is paid as much as $1 million for the release of each abducted wealthy Nigerian.

It is widely assumed in Nigeria that Boko Haram receives support from religious sympathizers inside the country, including some wealthy professionals and northern Nigerians who dislike the government, although little evidence has been made public to support that assertion.

Current and former U.S. and Nigerian officials say Boko Haram’s operations do not require significant amounts of money, which means even successful operations tracking and intercepting their funds are unlikely to disrupt their campaign.

LOW-COST WEAPONS
Much of Boko Haram’s military hardware is not bought, it is stolen from the Nigerian army.

In February, dozens of its fighters descended on a remote military outpost in the Gwoza hills in northeastern Borno state, looting 200 mortar bombs, 50 rocket-propelled grenades and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. Such raids have left the group well armed.

In dozens of attacks in the past year Nigerian soldiers were swept aside by militants driving trucks, motor bikes and sometimes even stolen armoured vehicles, firing rocket-propelled grenades.

Boko Haram’s inner leadership is security savvy, not only in the way it moves money but also in its communications, relying on face-to-face contact, since messages or calls can be intercepted, the current and former U.S. officials said.

“They’re quite sophisticated in terms of shielding all of these activities from legitimate law enforcement officials in Africa and certainly our own intelligence efforts trying to get glimpses and insight into what they do,” a former U.S. military official said.

U.S. officials acknowledge that the weapons that have served Washington so well in its financial warfare against other terrorist groups are proving less effective against Boko Haram.

“My sense is that we have applied the tools that we do have but that they are not particularly well tailored to the way that Boko Haram is financing itself,” a U.S. defense official said.