Hackers Find Korea a Safe Place to Launch Attacks

The dominant use of Windows operating system but lacking in cyber security and unique Internet infrastructure has helped Korean hackers to find the country a safe haven.

According to overseas media reports, most of the undesirable data originated from PCs in South Korea making the country appear to be involved in numerous attacks. The North American Network Operators' Group had compiled certain data from which the Korean government cited some to confirm that 61% of the rogue data had its source in South Korea.

Still the Ministry of Information and Communication straight away rejected the doubt on Korea as the key culprit responsible for the cyber attacks.

A director at the ministry, Mr. Lee Doo-won said they came to know that a server in Coburg, Germany instructed a series of Korean computers to launch DOS attacks on the root servers. The Korea Times published Mr. Doo-won's statement on February 19, 2007. This means the virus-infected computers in Korea flooded the root servers with malware following the direction of the German host server, Lee said. He further added that many of their computers worked like zombies.

With a wide range of interconnected network, Korea has long been the most preferred place for hacking activity. The interconnected network is the primary aid to creating zombie PCs.

In addition almost 14 million of the Korean households use a full-time high-speed Internet connection to represent the world's highest rate of broadband usage. Hackers abused this much acclaimed infrastructure and led U.S. to consider Korea as the primary source of assault with DOS attacks, Lee said.

Microsoft, the creator of Windows Software said that in Korea the rates of patches for Windows are much lower than in other countries.

The nation now plans to upgrade its infrastructure to a Broadband Convergence Network (BcN). But the BcN network has two sides to it. While it can make the daily life more convenient, it can help to attack root servers, said an official at the Korea Information Security Agency. However, to prevent the abuse of BcN, people can remain alert about cyber security issues and deploy periodic patch upgrades.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 2/28/2007