Futurize Korea

The National Police of Korea was able to track down two Web services in Korea that were responsible for distributing the malware to launch the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks earlier this month:

“Just because malicious code distributors were located from Korea, it doesn’t necessarily mean the hackers launched the attack in Korea,” said a spokesman with the police agency. But he added that the hacker or hackers must be “very familiar with Korea’s Internet environment.”

Security expert Bruce Schneier responded to the government and media hype over the attacks:

Sure, a few government websites were knocked out, but that's not alarming or even uncommon. Other government websites were attacked but defended themselves, the sort of thing that happens all the time. If this is what an international cyberattack looks like, it hardly seems worth worrying about at all.

The New York Times also looked at how anonymity on the Internet will make it difficult to ever track down the creator of the attacks.

JoongAng Daily profiled the experience of Korean security firm AhnLab in responding to the DDoS attacks:

“At first, on July 6, we had no idea that the attacks were going to be big,” said Kim So-heon, senior research engineer at the company’s ASEC (AhnLab Security Emergency Response Center). “After a day however, it became an endless series of attacks, with not just one malicious code but many, which made it extremely difficult to identify and target the problem for countermeasures.”

Other security firms experienced a surge in sales of security hardware to organizations looking to protect their networks from future attacks:

As companies and government organizations looking to up their guard against possible online assaults in the future, computer networking firms such as Nowcom, Cisco Korea, Arbor Networks and Radware Korea are finding a quickly-expanding market for their distributed denial of service (DDoS) defense solutions.

KBS: New Security Center to Counter Cyber Attacks

Korea Herald: Seoul slashed cyber security staff by 80%