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Official says 7 SKorean Web sites attacked
South Korean Web sites were attacked again on July 9 after a wave of Web site outages in the United States and South Korea that several officials suspect North Korea was behind. Seven sites, one belonging to the government and the others to private entities, were attacked in the third round of cyber assaults, said an official from the state-run Korea Communications Commission. Earlier in the day, the country’s leading
computer security company, AhnLab, had warned of a new attack after
analyzing a virus program that sent a flood of Internet traffic to paralyze
Web sites in both South Korea and the United States. About two hours after the latest assault, all but one shopping site were working normally. The Yonhap news agency had earlier reported that the Web site of the leading Kookmin Bank was down for about 30 minutes.
The South’sintelligence agency said in a statement Thursday that it was strengthening cyber security measures for government computer networks, citing a possible new wave of attacks that could target national infrastructure operators like energy, telecommunications, and media companies. So far, there were no immediate reports of financial damage or leaking of confidential national information, according to the Korea Information Security Agency.
The attacks appeared aimed only at paralyzing Web sites. According to Reuters, cybersecurity analysts raised doubts on July 8 that the North Korean state launched the attacks on U.S. government and South Korean Web sites, saying industrial spies or pranksters could be the villains. More than two dozen Web sites in the United States and South Korea, including that of the U.S. State Department, were attacked in recent days. South Korea’s spy agency has said North Korea may be behind the attacks, while the U.S. government has said it is too soon to make such claims, and Internet security experts agree.
The Associated Press: Official says 7 SKorean Web sites attacked again
Cyber attacks may not have come from North Korea | Reuters