South Korea and US hit by major cyber attack
Güncelleme Tarihi:
SEOUL - South Korea's intelligence service believes North Korea or its sympathizers may have staged a major cyber attack that shut down U.S. and South Korean Web sites, lawmakers said on Wednesday.
The attack late Tuesday hit a total of 25 U.S. and South Korean sites - some of them official - with those in South Korea shut down for nearly four hours. "This is not a simple attack by individuals. The attack appeared to have been elaborately prepared and staged by a certain organization or state," Seoul's National Intelligence Service said in a statement.
Yonhap news agency said the NIS, which has launched an investigation, told parliament's intelligence committee that the communist North or people sympathetic to the isolated state may have been to blame.
"The NIS has been telling committee members that North Korea or a pro-North Korean force might be behind the cyber terror," it quoted one legislator as saying.
In its statement the NIS said U.S. authorities were cooperating to track down those responsible for hijacking 12,000 personal computers in South Korea and 8,000 abroad, which were exploited as vehicles for the attacks.
"The sites hit yesterday included 14 U.S. sites including government ones," a spokesman for the Korea Information Security Agency told Agence France-Presse, refusing to confirm a Yonhap report that the White House website was among those targeted. In Korea, the defense and foreign ministries, the ruling party, parliament and the U.S.-South Korea combined forces military command were among the 11 entities affected. South Korea is one of the world's most wired countries, with 95 percent of homes having broadband access, according to a US survey.
The regulatory Korea Communications Commission said hackers had caused an attack known as a distributed denial of service, or DdoS, by planting viruses in thousands of computers. "Malicious codes which cause DDoS attacks have infected more than 18,000 personal computers," commission official Hwang Chul-Jung told reporters. Hackers continued to attack some sites Wednesday, he said, adding Internet service providers were distributing a program to remove the virus.
DDoS attacks involve the sending of huge amounts of data that cause web servers to seize up. The damage appeared limited.