North Korea Responsible for the Assaults against South Korea, States McAfee

McAfee the security software company reports that government websites of South Korea, which were compromised with cyber assaults during early 2011, might've been targeted with cyber war military exercises that North Korea conducted, published TNW in news on July 5, 2011.

It is reported, the assault targeted approximately 40 websites with DDoS (distributed denial of service) conditions, wherein the websites of the National Intelligence Agency and those of the president comprised a few, prompting state authorities to give out their 3rd-highest security warning vis-à-vis cyber attacks.

Apparently, the report by McAfee is based on an assessment of the malware that the hackers utilized for waging the DDoS assaults in March 2011 on South Korean websites. Notably, in a DDoS assault, websites are crippled with the help of overwhelming traffic.

McAfee, which, on July 5, 2011, issued a document, stated that the attackers possibly assembled a botnet i.e. an army of infected PCs, which executed the assaults. The said PCs likely were infected with malware through a well-known file-sharing website hosted in South Korea. Moreover, the botnet was regulated remotely with the hackers' command-and-control (C&C) servers.

Stated Vice-President of Threat Research Dmitri Alperovitch at McAfee, it was hard for guessing as to precisely who launched the assaults. According to him, an elaborate analysis of the assault as well as the PC program utilized during the 2009 and then again the 2011 assaults revealed that the same person was behind the assaults. This observation was 95% correct, Alperovitch claimed. Forbes.com published this in news on July 5, 2011.

Alperovitch further explained that the assaults represented cyber-war military exercises executed for finding out the extent of difficulty in destabilizing government websites during war times. This way, according to Alperovitch, the SK assaults were increasingly alarming compared to any that the LulzSec and Anonymous hacker cabals launched recently. TNW published this in news on July 5, 2011.

In the meantime, prosecutors in South Korea stated that hackers in North Korea were responsible for the alleged DDoS assault earlier during the current spring; however, the Ministry of the People's Armed Forces in North Korea refuted it.

Related article: North Korea Attacked South Korean Army Colonel With Spyware

» SPAMfighter News - 7/12/2011