Blue Star Chronicles

Multiple US government agencies were hit with a widespread computer attack on the 4th of July. South Korean government agencies experienced similar attacks. It is suspected that these were a North Korean cyber attack. Read about it and see a video on cyber attacks below.

North Korean Cyber Attack?

North Korea promised to attack the United States on the 4th of July this year. Its a little gift they seem to want to offer us every year on our Independence Day. The United States, South Korea, Japan and Australia watch and prepared as North Korea conducted missile tests and sent ships out to see, suspected of carrying weapons in violation of U.N. resolutions. On July 4th, the North Koreans launched seven missiles over the Atlantic Ocean in our general direction. None reached our shores, but it was an obvious threat and signal of disrespect.

The American holiday came and went without further incident, or so we thought.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team reported to federal agencies that multiple US government agencies were hit with a widespread computer attack that began on the 4th of July. The attacks have been ongoing and particularly resilient. Its referred to as a denial of service attack. Various federal systems have been down periodically for periods of time since the July 4th holiday. In addition, South Korean government websites were hit with the cyber attacks. The attacks on the two countries seem to come from the same sources and to be related.

Affected American agencies included the US Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, Stock Exchange, the White House and Transportation Department. The South Koreans presidential Blue House and Defense Ministry and National Assembly were affected. It is being described as a ‘massive outage’. The attack cause computers to slow down and some to completely shut for hours at a time. As of Wednesday, July 8, 2009, some systems have come back online, but many remain unstable or inaccessible.

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote Systems, called it a “massive outage” and said problems with the Transportation Department site began Saturday and continued until Monday, while the FTC site was down Sunday and Monday.

Keynote Systems is a mobile and Web site monitoring company. The company publishes data detailing outages on Web sites, including 40 government sites it watches.

According to Rushlo, the Transportation Web site was “100 percent down” for two days, so that no Internet users could get through to it. The FTC site, meanwhile, started to come back online late Sunday, but even on Tuesday Internet users still were unable to get to the site 70 percent of the time.

“This is very strange. You don’t see this,” he said. “Having something 100 percent down for a 24-hour-plus period is a pretty significant event.”

He added that, “The fact that it lasted for so long and that it was so significant in its ability to bring the site down says something about the site’s ability to fend off (an attack) or about the severity of the attack.”

South Korean intelligence is reporting that 12,000 computers in South Korea and 8,000 in other countries are being used for the attacks. They are also reporting that the infected computers are still attacking and their numbers are not decreasing.

South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency is reporting that The National Security Intelligence Service (NIS) believes that North Korea may be behind the cyber attack. U.S. officials have confirmed that there has been ‘malicious Web activity’ but would not elaborate and are not releasing any specifics about the attack.