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Extensive Cyber Attack Still Affecting U.S. Agencies
The cyber attack that affected both South Korea and U.S. government agencies was even more powerful than initially realized. The attack took place during the July 4 holiday. The attack was aimed at many agencies but luckily many organizations were able to undermine sustained computer assaults.
U.S. targets included the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the NASDAQ and the Washington Post. The White House, Pentagon, and New York Stock Exchange were also targeted but not affected.
The attack was remarkably successful in limiting public access to the web sites of these agencies, but internal e-mail systems were unaffected. However, the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission, and Secret Service are still reporting problems days after the event.
The presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry in addition to some banking sites in South Korea were still experiencing problems on Tuesday. South Korea Intelligence believes that the attacks were initiated by North Korea sympathizers in the South.
South Korea intelligence investigating the incident believes that one attack occurred on July 4. Some agencies were able to contain the attack, but then a second attack came on July 7.
Officials think it will be difficult to determine who is responsible for the attacks because there were between 30,000 and 60,000 computers that participated in the assault. Many personal computers were infected by a virus which ordered them to visit major official Web sites in South Korea and the U.S. at the same time.
One U.S. federal agency received one million hits per second per attack which added up to 4 billion internet hits at once. The site was only geared to handle 25,000 hits.
These government agencies need to have better security. Apparently some agencies were prepared and others were not. There needs to be an organized effort in order to ensure that an attack will not mess up or shut down our government sites.
If our sites can’t defend themselves now, what will happen when there is a full attack launched against us and cyber attackers are trying to shut down more than just public access to the sites? The answer, is serious trouble.
The more advanced these attackers get, the easier it will be to shut our systems down. One example is satellites. Two years ago there was a cyber attack that shut a U.S. satellite down while it was over China, and it took several hours to get it working properly again.
In another instance, the Chinese tried to hack into the military email system (milnet) and other systems. Cyber security is very important these days because everything is run by a computer. America has many enemies out there and really needs to take these threats seriously and place a top priority on improving their defenses in order to protect itself from future attacks.
