Archives » Sunday, July 12, 2009
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Newsweek
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Jul 12, 2009 08:49 AM
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.
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