Suspected Cyber Attacks Cripple South Korean Sites

July 8, 2009 · Filed Under News by Kalyani Mukherjee·

Websites of several South Korean agencies collapsed on Tuesday as a result of suspected cyber attacks that appear to be linked to similar attacks on US sites, according to South Korean officials.

Important government agencies, banks and other official institutions in South Korea found that their websites had been hacked and paralyzed by suspected cyber criminals. Among the top sites that suffered outage were those of the presidential Blue House, the National Assembly, the Ministry of Defense, the Korea Exchange Bank and the Shinhan Bank. South Korea’s popular Internet portal Naver also had access problems on Tuesday while many of the sites continued to remain unstable till Wednesday morning.

Seoul-based Korean Information Security Agency said on Tuesday that the outage occurred because of denial of service attacks. In such a situation huge numbers of computers try to access the same site at the same time, thus paralyzing the server that manages the traffic to the particular site. The agency spokesperson Ahn Jeong-eun however clarified that as yet there was no reports of financial loss or theft of confidential information due to the cyber attacks.

The attack on South Korean websites come a couple of days after US sites became the victim of a widespread and virulent computer attack that started from July 4th.

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