Analyst: Cyber Attack Not the Handiwork of Kim Jong Il

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Newsweek

This comes to us from Newsweek's Matt Berman, who works in our New York office.

After an international cyber attack crippled government and news websites in the U.S. and South Korea early last week, analysts quickly suspected it to be the work of North Korea. A trail of evidence pointed to a series of computers -- ones found in homes, schools, and offices -- all loaded with a virus to repeatedly visit foreign sites and overwhelm them with traffic, thus making them crash. Some of the attacked sites, like White House's and Pentagon's, were able to deter the attacks, while other sites like the US Federal Trade Commission's experienced periodic black outs for days. But in all actuality, could the rogue military-state really have orchestrated such an effort? At least one technology analyst says no, suggesting that it was a criminal rather than military effort that originated in North Korea. "The structure of the attacks seems to indicate it's a civilian, cybercriminal effort," says Susan Brenner, a professor of cyber crimes at the University of Dayton School of Law and author of Cyberthreats: The Emerging Fault Lines of the Nation State.

The recent cyber attacks took the form of what hacking experts call a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), meaning that computers located in different areas work together on the same attack. According to Brenner, it's a tactic cyber criminals routinely use to commit cyber crimes, such as extortion. On some occasions, the cyber criminals even make direct demands from their victims in exchange for an end to the attacks.

But even if the web assault wasn't orchestrated by Kim Jong Il or other top government leaders, it wasn't unreasonable to think so. For a country with limited military resources like North Korea, cyber warfare could be a useful alternative to physical military strength. "Cyber warfare can avoid or minimize the 'you break it, you own it' situation that can result from the use of traditional weapons," says Brenner. "If a hostile nation-state used cyberspace to shut down portions of the power grid in the U.S., that would create a fair amount of havoc and probably some incidental injuries, deaths and property damage." What's more, cyber weapons can be difficult for some countries to acquire and allow perpetrators plausible deniability--nearly impossible, as history has shown, for any country to achieve in physical acts of war.

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