AP:
Computers blamed for outages on SKorea, US websites last year repeat attacks but do no damage
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Hundreds of computers that helped cause a wave of outages on U.S. and South Korean government websites last July launched new attacks on the same sites, but no major interference was reported, police said Thursday.
The computers were programmed to attack every July 7, according to police, so this year's assault appeared to be a continuation of last year's, which began over the July 4 holiday weekend in the U.S. but reached South Korea on July 7.
More than 460 computers infected with malicious computer codes assaulted 25 websites, including those of the White House and South Korea's presidential Blue House, on Wednesday, said Jeong Seok-hwa, a police officer handling investigations of the cyberattacks.
Although last year's attacks were initially blamed on North Korea, experts have more recently said they have no conclusive evidence that it was behind the assaults.
The malicious computer codes, called malware, triggered denial of service attacks, in which large numbers of computers try to connect to a site at the same time in an attempt to overwhelm the server.
"But the attacks were so weak that there were no problems in accessing the sites," Jeong said.
An analysis of an infected computer in Seoul showed that it was programmed to attack every July 7 and the malware used was identical to that used last year, said Hyun Jae-sub, another police official. In other words, the computers apparently attacked again this year because last year's malware hadn't been removed, not because another assault was launched.
Hyun said the attacks were traced to computers that participated in last year's attacks and still were infected. He said about 270,000 infected computers were involved in the original assaults. [link]
posted by: gqjournal
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