North Korea blamed for ‘massive’ cyber attacks

[jimmy olsen]

China I could believe, but North Korea? I'd be surprised if they had the capability to do this. 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31789294/ns/technology_and_science-security/

North Korea blamed for 'massive' cyber attacks
Officials eye link after assault took down U.S., S. Korean government sites

msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 1 hour, 37 minutes ago

SEOUL, South Korea - South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations, including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry, went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems. She said the agency is investigating the case with police and prosecutors.

In the United States, the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the July 4 holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Denial of service attack
Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

"It certainly seems to be a well-organized attack," an anonymous government official told The Washington Post. "There are a lot of computers involved. What we don't know is who is orchestrating it."

The Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at Seoul's University of North Korean Studies, said he doubts whether the impoverished North has the capability to knock down the Web sites.

But Hong Hyun-ik, an analyst at the Sejong Institute think tank, said the attack could have been done by either North Korea or China, saying he "heard North Korea has been working hard to hack into" South Korean networks.

Denial of service attacks against Web sites are not uncommon, and are usually caused when sites are deluged with Internet traffic so as to effectively take them off-line. Mounting such an attack can be relatively easy using widely available hacking programs, and they can be made far more serious if hackers infect and use thousands of computers tied together into "botnets."

For instance, last summer, in the weeks leading up to the war between Russia and Georgia, Georgian government and corporate Web sites began to see "denial of service" attacks. The Kremlin denied involvement, but a group of independent Western computer experts traced domain names and Web site registration data to conclude that the Russian security and military intelligence agencies were involved.

N. Korean sympathizers behind attacks?
On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers "were behind" the attacks, according to an aide to one of lawmakers who was briefed on the information.

An aide to another lawmaker who was briefed also said the NIS suspects North Korea or its followers were responsible.

The aides spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity and refused to allow the names of the lawmakers they work for to be published, citing the classified nature of the information.

Both aides told The AP that the information was delivered in writing to lawmakers who serve on the National Assembly's intelligence committee.

The National Intelligence Service — South Korea's main spy agency — declined to confirm the information.

'Massive outage'
Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a "massive outage" and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company based in San Mateo, Calif. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was "100 percent down" for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

"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."

He added that, "The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site's ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack."

South Korea's Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by North Korean hackers and pro-North Korea forces in South Korea. South Korea's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report.

According to The Washington Post, Joe Stewart, the director of malware research at Atlanta based SecureWorks, said the attack software contained few clues about its origins, although a line of text deep in within the malware carried the cryptic message "get/china/dns."

Earlier Wednesday, South Korea's NIS said in a statement that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack.

The agency said it believed the attack was "thoroughly" prepared and committed by hackers "at the level of a certain organization or state." It said it was cooperating with the American investigators to examine the case.

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.

An initial investigation in South Korea found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the United States at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries.

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment.

Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. Police officer Jeong Seok-hwa said that could take several days.

Some of the South Korean sites remained unstable or inaccessible Wednesday. The site of the presidential Blue House could be accessed, but those for the Defense Ministry, the ruling Grand National Party and the National Assembly could not.

Ahn said there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information. The alleged attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites, she said.

South Korea's Defense Ministry and Blue House said that there has been no leak of any documents.

Difficult to document
Documenting cyber attacks against government sites is difficult, and depends heavily on how agencies characterize an incident and how successful or damaging it is.

Government officials routinely say their computers are probed millions of times a day, with many of those being scans that don't trigger any problems. In a June report, the congressional Government Accountability Office said federal agencies reported more than 16,000 threats or incidents last year, roughly three times the amount in 2007. Most of those involved unauthorized access to the system, violations of computer use policies or investigations into potentially harmful incidents.

The Homeland Security Department, meanwhile, says there were 5,499 known breaches of U.S. government computers in 2008, up from 3,928 the previous year, and just 2,172 in 2006.

The Associated Press and msnbc.com staff contributed to this story

[Razgovory]

Beat you to it.

[KRonn]

The paranoid, self contained slave labor state, ruled by leaders with a Furher bunker mentality, strikes again!   

[jimmy olsen]

Beat you to it.

You can hardly blame me for not seeing it tucked away there.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I predict no punitive actions will be taken lest they resume missile tests.

[Siege]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

[Neil]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

Read the article, you ignorant slob.

[Admiral Yi]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

Just read the headline then post some bullshit.

[DisturbedPervert]

If Battle.net goes down North Korea is finished.

[Siege]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

Just read the headline then post some bullshit.

I don't want to fall in the Tim/MB cathegory.

[Darth Wagtaros]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

Just read the headline then post some bullshit.

I don't want to fall in the Typical Languish User category.

Fixed that for you.

[DontSayBanana]

How the hell could the Norks have orchestrated a DDoS attack with old 386s?

[Martinus]

Why are there no highlights in the opening post?

How do I know what to read?

Just read the headline then post some bullshit.

[Darth Wagtaros]

How the hell could the Norks have orchestrated a DDoS attack with old 386s?

Probably easier than a new Windows box.

[Vince]

How the hell could the Norks have orchestrated a DDoS attack with old 386s?

I thought they were still using Commodore 64s...