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Top South Korean Websites Hit by Cyber Attacks

Websites of around 40 prominent South Korean institutions, including the presidential office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, were attacked by cybercriminals on March 4, 2011). It is assumed that the attackers compromised two peer-to-peer file-sharing websites with malware, as reported BBC on March 04, 2011.

The attacks were similar in nature to those that attacked South Korean websites during July 2009. It introduced various malicious codes that caused personal machines to attack websites without users' permission. Nearly 29 institutions were negatively affected by so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDoS), which overburden a website with data causing it to decline over.

Afterwards, the government had released a cyber security alert warning. Cyber security professionals related with the government and Internet security firms are working to deal with this recent challenge.

DDoS attacks are targeted at causing disturbance in the services of the particular website. Attackers begin instantaneous requests to the web server from various infected systems, making it tough for the website to offer common services to the legal website users. Information technology (IT) security experts are investigating the sternness of the attack.

Immediately after the attack, the Korea Communications commission, the state telecommunications policymaker, released a second-level warning regarding the attack. Commenting on the matter, a KCC official stated that, the number of zombie systems, which were compromised with malware and were participating in the attack, presently sums up to 11,000, quite lesser than the 115,000 during the 2009 attacks, as reported by The Korea Herald on March 04, 2011.

He further added that, however, they are alert and formulating measures as the number is expected to augment.

Remarkably, websites acts as an interface for communication among the organizations and clients. Databases attached to the website might have secret customer and business information. As such, they are vulnerable to interruption efforts from cybercrooks.

Thus, the reason for the attack might be to interrupt services or steal personal information. Appointing cyber security specialists such as penetration testers, computer science degree holders, computer forensics experts, security analyst, and auditors might help in the prevention and well-timed identification and alleviation of security errors.

Supposedly, the government moved to establish a cyber security centre for the financial and economic institutes, asserting it would comprise functions to defy the DDoS attacks.

Related article: Top Law Enforcement Office Fails to Recognize A phishing E-Mail

» SPAMfighter News - 3/14/2011

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