South Korea Cyber-Attacked

Facts When: March 20, 2013

Three major banks• Shinhan Bank• NongHyup Bank• Jeju Bank

Two largest broadcasters• Korean Broadcasting System• MBC

Attack on Banks All three banks reported that their internet

servers were down and all ATM services were consequently down

Operations were paralyzed due to computer virus infection and erased files.

Banks stated that they were down for approximately two hours.

They also reported that no customer data or information was lost or corrupted.

Attack on Brodcasters

Both KBS and MBC reported that their computers had been frozen

KBS website was down

They were both able to maintain normal broadcasting despite this

What Caused It? Malware known as “DarkSeoul”

Identified about a year ago Targeted to attack South Korea’s

most popular anti-virus products○ AhnLab and Hauri AV

“Denial of service” attack? Flooding servers with data causing them

to crash

Denial Of Service Attack

An attempt to make a network resource unavailable to its users.

Main purpose to temporarily or indefinitely interrupt or suspend a service of a host connected to the internet.

Saturating target with too many requests to make traffic blocks.

Who are the attackers?

Not yet Identified The attacks were relatively

unsophisticated Required little expertise or infrastructure

Speculation: China North Korea

Summary Source of attacks have not yet been

identified

Identification may take months and may not yield a definite answer

South Korea military has raised its cyber-security levels and has advised all South Korean government agencies and businesses to increase cyber-attack defenses

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/world/asia/south-korea-computer-network-crashes.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

http://www.news.com.au/technology/n-korea-behind-s-korea-computer-crash/story-e6frfro0-1226602048092

http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/world/asia/south-korea-computer-outage/index.html