North Korea Internet down - Is it a USA vs CHINA alliance?

North Korea's Internet was on the fritz for a second day Tuesday. But the US is staying silent on whether it launched a cyber attack as payback for the hacking of Sony Pictures.

And in the murky world of cyber security, experts say there are several plausible scenarios for why North Korea suddenly went dark, stressing it's impossible to know exactly what happened.While some have been quick to make the link between Pyongyang's connectivity woes and a pledge by US President Barack Obama to retaliate for last month's Sony hack, many analysts aren't convinced.

"We don't have direct evidence of some kind of cyber attack, but it would be consistent with that," he told AFP. Given the low-level of sophistication "the cast of characters that could have pulled this off is immense."

"If a nation state such as the US wanted to take North Korea off, I'm not sure it would have taken them 12 hours."

... On the other hand, simply pulling a plug would not have caused the "hours and hours" of instability in the networks, which first alerted Dyn Research to the problem.CSIS analyst Lewis believes the top scenario is the North Koreans either "inadvertently doing this, or more likely combing through their networks" to figure out how the US traced them to the Sony attack.

"The pattern of up-and-down connectivity, followed by a total outage, is consistent with a fragile network under external attack," said Cowie.

Madory argued, however, that if the United States is not involved it should come out and say so, and similarly China Unicom could share its data in a bid to solve the mystery.

Read Full Gist:  http://www.firstpost.com/world/north-koreas-internet-outage-experts-debate-cause-behind-shutdown-2012875.html