North Korea Could Be Behind Massive US, South Korean Website Cyberattack

More details have emerged as to the scale of the cyberattack that brought down several governmental websites in the US and in South Korea over the past weekend and coincided with Independence Day in the US.

Many suspect North Korea to have launched the attack which hit up to 25 websites closing some of them for as long as four hours. It is not known whether the coordinated attack was a simple Distributed Denial of service or a hacking attempt or a mixture of both.

The National Intelligence Service, South Korea's Intelligence Agency, issued a statement saying that "This is not a simple attack by individuals, The attack appeared to have been elaborately prepared and staged by a certain organisation or state. The attacks consisted of massive harmful traffic to specific sites causing access slowdown or disablement. Some national institutions, banks and media sites have been targeted."

The attack was carried out by a botnet made up of more than 18,000 computers which were infected by a version of the MyDoom worm according to web security researchers from Korean computer security company AhnLab.

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Further analysis of the code has also revealed that attackers could possibly change the list of sites targeted in a second wave of attack.

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