At the moment, I don’t see their servers serving cached content on any of the major CDNs being used by larger news organizations.
UNDER ATTACK, DDOS FROM THE DPRK
East Asia Tribune, through their Facebook page claims that their web servers were being DDoS’d by the North Koreans as their servers were running slow and at times refused to load at all.
From their Facebook page;
Once again, we regret to report that our website is down. It appears the firewall has been breached by another attack originating from a North Korean IP address. We will update all once our server is back online, and please accept our apologies for the interruption.
Update: Our IT department advises that the intrusion has now been resolved, and the site should be accessible once more. If there are any further attacks, we will update this post.
Now it’s easy to blame a rouge, isolated, state that’s technically at war with the rest of the world, as to have been behind attacks on their servers, but I doubt this being true at all. Remember, their post have been shared over 16k times and that would’ve been enough to bring down any basic WordPress installation.
Then there’s this site that tracks known DDoS attacks in real time and any major news organization that has some reputation would’ve required a really huge DDos attack and that would’ve registered on their network. Something would’ve turned up elsewhere citing a DDoS attack from the North Koreans.
(See source).
Someone will have to correct me on this but I’d assume a massive North Korean DDoS attack would instead use China as a springboard for attacks since its infrastructure must practically go through China.
SO WHAT GIVES? I THOUGHT YOU LIKED THE STORY?
Honestly, I enjoyed reading through the material and I am still waiting for the next batch posts that would tell if they got Sun-Young out of the DPRK or if they all died trying. Hey, if it turned out that way, Chu Jingyi, whoever he is, that would’ve been something, a really nice piece of fiction.
But I just really don’t like getting fooled into thinking something is legit, and that has really gotten to my nerves. Their article was well-written enough, let’s give them that. However, this is a work of fiction, their entire outfit is ficticious, and some 20 minutes of checking on who they were was enough for me to arrive at this conclusion.
For a moment these guys got through my B.S. detector for brief period of time and I fell for it. Now I just have to be more careful in the future.
Update: As of May, 2017, the original website has been taken down. However, someone posted a text copy of the entire series on Pastebin.com (see https://pastebin.com/8BTSXCK2).