[Infowarrior] - Inside the South Korean cyber-attack

[Richard Forno]

Your hard drive will self-destruct at 2pm: Inside the South Korean cyber-attack

But the defacement of a website during the attack may be a separate problem.

by Sean Gallagher - Mar 20 2013, 10:15pm EDT

A cyber-attack in South Korea on Wednesday took the networks of several companies offline. While some recovered in a matter of hours, South Korea's public broadcasting organization, KBS, is still offline. But the identity of the person or group behind the attacks is still an open question—one muddied by the hackers who are taking credit for at least part of it. It's not clear at this point if the attack was state-sponsored, cyber-warfare by North Korea or simply an act of cyberterrorism by hackers looking to make a virtual name for themselves.

As we reported earlier, at about 2pm Seoul time, the networks of three broadcasters and three banks were affected by an attack that disrupted their networks, possibly caused by malware. But while malware was initially blamed for the outage, the malware that's been discovered thus far could not have taken networks down by itself. There was a lot more going on than just a malware attack; the convergence of multiple types of attacks suggests a coordinated effort by an organized attacker.

The latest update from South Korean officials is that the attack emanated from a Chinese IP address. But the identity of the attackers is still unclear.....

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http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/03/your-hard-drive-will-self-destruct-at-2pm-inside-the-south-korean-cyber-attack/

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