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DoS Attack Hits Korean Trading Sites

A recent Denial of Service (DOS) attack launched at a massive scale has brought down several major virtual items trading Websites. These sites based in Korea contribute a large portion of an estimated $1 Billion worth of trade in the country of virtual goods of weapons, gold and items for online games like World of Warcraft.

The trading companies believe hackers attacked them because of their relatively weak security systems as opposed to those of online game operators. The criminals sent huge numbers of requests to the computer servers and due to high traffic, the computers slowed down to eventually shut down. The technique is referred to as Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

The most trickiest and advanced stage in a DoS assault is the DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attack. It occurs when computer viruses manipulate lakhs of computers simultaneously to launch an attack on a target machine.

Trading site ItemMania's spokesperson told reporters that their Website was going through a maintenance process to manage an unexpected surge of visitors. Later, another trading site ItemRia, smaller in size, posted an announcement that the hacking attack had victimized it. Although the site is relatively functional now, the notice is still there on its home page.

According to the local press reports in Korea, these DoS attacks are the act of Chinese hackers. They cited anonymous sources of online security, which claim that the flood of undesirable incoming traffic was linked to numerous Chinese IP addresses.

Earlier, malicious hackers launched DoS attacks from networks of bot-infected computers to trick Website operators to part with their money. According to local media, the purpose of the recent attacks is to blackmail the affected site operators. These sites reportedly manage over 90% of Korea's goods trading over the Internet. They churn business of a value of $3 Million per day, according to the statistics of the Korean government.

Amidst this untoward incident, a similar DoS attack affected the Website of The Korea Times newspaper during October 10-11, 2007. The newspaper discovered that the source of the attacks was a foreign IP address.

Related article: Dixie College Suffers Data Hack

» SPAMfighter News - 10/26/2007

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