Now anonymous sources within the government of South Korea are saying what so many of us have been thinking: the North Korean government was behind last weekend’s cyber attacks on South Korea.

Reports leaking out of a South Korean intelligence briefing are indicating that the recent cyber-attacks which hampered sites in both South Korea and the United States were implemented by the North Korean army. The North Koreans boasted last month that they were “fully ready for any form of high-tech war” and the recent attacks may well have been an attempt to prove it.

The attacks were powerful examples of the “denial of service” tactic, which occurs when there is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users buy overwhelming it with aggressive requests. Often, such attacks are carried out on a distributed basis, using a large number of personal computers being controlled by one source, generally via computer worms or viruses on the affected computers. In this case, the malware is said to have been distributed by North Korea, and the resulting spybot network controlled by them.

The mass circulation newspaper JoongAng Ilbo has reported that a research institute run by the North Korean Army and known as Lab 110 was directly responsible for the attacks. The paper said that North Korean Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, of which Lab 110 is a part, received and executed an order which instructed them to “destroy the South Korean puppet communications networks in an instant.”

There has been little, if any, official confirmation of the information leaked from the intelligence briefing, according to an AP story out of South Korea. South Korea’s NIS, the country’s main intelligence agency, has said only that it has “various evidence” which ties North Korea to the attacks. As of this writing, the South Korean government has been mainly silent about the identity of the attackers.

There have been a few internet addresses blocked as a result of the investigation into the attacks, but usually such addresses turn out to be false leads behind which the attackers are successfully hiding. The wave of attacks appears to have crested, with no new attacks since yesterday. One has to wonder if governments can develop adequate defenses for attacks such as these and, if so, when they will do it.

Related:

Entry was posted on Saturday, July 11th, 2009 at 6:21 pm under Crime, Hacking, Internet, Malware, Politics.

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
Stumble It!