North Korea behind denial of service attacks?

By Cynthia J. Larose

Reports today are indicating that several South Korean Web sites have been attacked again. Several officials have voiced speculation that North Korea was behind both today's denial of service attacks and last week's wave of outages that hit sites in both the U.S. and South Korea. No comment from Pyongyang.

The official news agency in South Korea says that today, seven sites - one belonging to the government and the others to private entities - were attacked.

The U.S. targets included the White House, Pentagon, Treasury Department and the Nasdaq stock exchange.

These attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of the global government and commercial web infrastructure to outside attack. The Obama Administration may want to reconsider the position of cyberczar and elevate it to Cabinet-level status.

For more:

FT.com / Global Economy - Fresh cyber attacks hit S Korea and US
New York Times
MSNBC
Wall Street Journal

(registration may be required to access some articles)

Subscribe To Viewpoints

Published

Viewpoint Topics

Professionals

Author

Cynthia J. Larose

Member / Chair, Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice

Cynthia J. Larose is Chair of the firm's Privacy & Cybersecurity Practice, a Certified Information Privacy Professional-US (CIPP-US), and a Certified Information Privacy Professional-Europe (CIPP-E). She works with clients in various industries to develop comprehensive information security programs on the front end, and provides timely counsel when it becomes necessary to respond to a data breach.