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Cyber attackers (distributed denial of service (DDoS) target South Korea & US Governments websites: N. Korea believed behind
By Amarendra Bhushan for CEOWORLD Magazine Updated:July 8, 2009
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South Korean security agencies probed a widespread cyber attack that shut down US and South Korean official websites. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it had launched a joint investigation with other security authorities into the breach.
Access to 25 Web sites — including those of the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, the National Assembly, Shinhan Bank, the mass-circulation daily newspaper Chosun and the top Internet portal Naver.com — have crashed or slowed down to a crawl since Tuesday evening, officials at the government’s Korea Information Security Agency said.
In the United States, 14 major Web sites — including those of the White House, the State Department and the New York Stock Exchange — came under similar attacks, according to anti-cyber terrorism police officers in Seoul, who suspected a link between the two waves of attacks.
South Korea is one of the world’s most wired countries, with 95 percent of homes having broadband access.
The regulatory Korea Communications Commission said hackers had caused an attack known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) by planting viruses in thousands of computers.
“Malicious codes which cause DDoS attacks have infected more than 18,000 personal computers,” commission official Hwang Chul-Jung told reporters.
DDoS attacks involve the sending of huge amounts of data that cause web servers to seize up.
The Defence Security Command last month reported that the nation’s military computer networks were under ever-growing cyber attack, with 95,000 cases reported daily on average.
The command said most were the same as those experienced by ordinary users, but 11 percent were sophisticated attempts to gather intelligence.
In South Korea, the Blue House reported no data loss or other damage except disrupted access. South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces in South Korea committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. Web sites.
What is Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS)?
A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system.
The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.
These attacks are extremely significant, as the root nameservers function as the Internet backbone, translating text-based Internet hostnames into IP addresses. As the nameservers provide this service for DNS lookups worldwide, attacks against the root nameservers are attempts to disable the Internet itself, rather than specific websites.
The first attack occurred on October 21, 2002, and lasted for approximately one hour.
A second attack occurred on February 6, 2007. The attack began at 10:30 UTC, and lasted about five hours.
Although none of the servers crashed, two of the root servers reportedly “suffered badly”, while others saw “heavy traffic”. The botnet responsible for the attack has reportedly been traced to the Asia-Pacific region. There was some speculation in the press that the attack originated from South Korea.
A DoS attack can be perpetrated in a number of ways. The five basic types of attack are:
1. Consumption of computational resources, such as bandwidth, disk space, or processor time
2. Disruption of configuration information, such as routing information.
3. Disruption of state information, such as unsolicited resetting of TCP sessions.
4. Disruption of physical network components.
5. Obstructing the communication media between the intended users and the victim so that they can no longer communicate adequately.
A DoS attack may include execution of malware intended to:
* Max out the processor’s usage, preventing any work from occurring.
* Trigger errors in the microcode of the machine.
* Trigger errors in the sequencing of instructions, so as to force the computer into an unstable state or lock-up.
* Exploits errors in the operating system to cause resource starvation and/or thrashing, i.e. to use up all available facilities so no real work can be accomplished.
* Crash the operating system itself.
* iFrame (D)DoS, in which an HTML document is made to visit a webpage with many KB’s of information many times, until they achieve the amount of visits to where bandwidth limit is exceeded.
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