Internet services across S. Korea shut down

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Adam Peake <ajp () glocom ac jp>
Date: Sat, 25 Jan 2003 21:31:44 +0900
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Internet services across S. Korea shut down

(from Kyodo News)
Internet services across S. Korea shut down

SEOUL Jan. 25 Kyodo - Internet services were shut down across South
Korea on Saturday afternoon in an apparent cyber attack committed by
hackers, Yonhap News Agency reported.

The unprecedented nationwide shutdown began with SK Telecom and Korea
Telecom Freetel, whose Nate and Magic N mobile Internet services
faltered nationwide around 2 p.m., the report said.

---

Dave, this follows a story yesterday about a Korean govt. warning of
expected denial-of-service attacks (story below.)

And sounds like Japan experienced something similar (but not
successful) earlier today. Expect there'll be full coverage v. soon.

Thanks,

Adam

Adam Peake
GLOCOM Tokyo


<http://asia.news.yahoo.com/030124/4/q4oi.html>

Friday January 24, 2:26 PM

Korea's Mic Issues Emergency Alert Against Computer Hacking

SEOUL, Jan 24 Asia Pulse - The Ministry of Information and
Communication (MIC) issued emergency alerts Friday warning domestic
personal computer (PC) users to be on guard against being used for
distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults.

The ministry said it was raising the alarm after it received reports
international hackers were using Korea as a springboard to launch
their electronic attacks on other computers.

It said that starting from Jan. 5, the Korea Information Security
Agency (KISA) has been receiving a large number of reports from U.S.
and Australian media companies that their systems were being
disrupted by Korean PC infiltrated by DDoS software.

DDoS attacks involve breaking into hundreds or thousands of machines
all over the Internet, followed by the hackers installing DDoS
software on them. Once this setup is in place, the attackers use all
the machines they control to launch coordinated attacks on victim
sites. These attacks typically exhaust bandwidth, router processing
capacity, or network stack resources, breaking network connectivity
to the victims.

Perpetrators of DDoS attacks target weakly-secured computers, using
well-known defects in standard network service programs, and common
weak configurations in operating systems

MIC also said it has counted 115 domestic systems have been
unwittingly been used as a conduit for DDoS attacks. It said 90
percent of the systems hacked infiltrated used Microsoft's Windows,
while the remainder were Unix's Solaris servers.

Related to this, MIC officials said since DDoS were carried out
through the "backdoor," a majority of Koreans who had been used did
not know a hacking system was installed in their computers.

They also said people can receive information on how to prevent DDoS
hacking by logging onto the homepages of MIC, the KISA, the Korea
Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Korea Network Information
Center.

In the wake of the DDoS assault, efforts will be redoubled to clean
up backdoor and remote control programs and carry out "exercises" on
future cyber attacks.

(Yonhap)
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