North Korea Cyber Attack
North Korea was indeed behind the cyberattacks that targeted dozens of Web sites in the U.S. and South Korea over the past week, a U.S. defense official told Fox News Wednesday afternoon.
According to the Washington Post, at least 35 government and commercial Web sites in South Korea and the United States came under major attack over the past several days, fueling suspicions of involvement by North Korea or its sympathizers.
South Korean media reported in May that North Korea was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service.
South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries, with broadband access in more than 90 percent of homes and Internet data-transfer speeds that are much faster than in most of the United States.
Ben Rushlo, Director of Internet technologies at Web site monitoring company Keynote Systems, said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.
Rushlo said that the Transportation Web site was “100 percent down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. “This is very strange. You don’t see this,” he said. “Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event.”
The Washington Post indicated that at least one expert described the software as “amateurish” and full of programming errors.
Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said that the agency was aware of ongoing attacks and that the government’s Computer Emergency Response Team had issued guidance to public- and private-sector Web sites on stemming them.
i hope they were using vista