North Korea's internet suffered a complete blackout on Monday 22 December and even now is still reportedly suffering from intermittent connection problems.
According to security company Arbor Networks, North Korea was hit by a sustained denial of service attack which was designed to overwhelm the country's servers.
The attack was partially successful as the entire country suffered an internet blackout for around 24 hours before intermittent service was resumed.
Dan Holden, director of security research at Arbor Networks spoke to the Guardian about the attack confirming that given North Korea's lack of technological sophistication it wouldn't take much to knock the entire country's internet offline.
“Anyone of us that was upset because we couldn’t watch the movie, you could do that. Their internet is just not that sophisticated.”
Holden's comments suggest that although the US Government is the likely perpetrator, the task could easily have been undertaken by a band of reasonably well-trained civilians who took umbrage over the Sony Pictures hack.
President Obama confirmed on Friday that the US would retaliate to the attack on Sony Pictures with appropriate force however he failed to go into further detail.
The US government has since declined to comment on the attack against North Korea so until more is known about the incident it'll be difficult to determine who was behind the attack.
What is certain however is that North Korea's internet blackout is connected to the recent cyber attack on Sony Pictures which saw the entire company's digital assets distributed online including payroll details, unreleased films and thousands of private emails.
Sony Pictures has since been trying to contain the spread of leaked corporate information including threats to sue Twitter after it failed to block those users that were posting leaked email conversations.