Cyber ALERT July 9, 2009

Fresh Cyber attacks were launched against South Korean websites Thursday. The Defense Ministry and National Intelligence Service were among the high profile targets. U.S. Sites have been recovering from this week's unprecedented DoS blitz although the Department of Transportation and Secret Service sites continue to have problems.

Security experts who examined code used in the attack say it appears to have been delivered to machines through the 2004 vintage “My Doom” worm under control of an unsophisticated hacker who compiled the virus using C++ on July 3, 2009.

According to Peder Jungck, founder and chief technology officer of Cloudshield, a California CyberSecurity firm, securing networks against the attacks, took several days because the technology that would be most effective at scouring the Web traffic for the code was not widely deployed by Internet providers and telecommunications companies.

Described as "amateurish" and “full of programming errors, examination of the virus has bolstered Seoul's suspicions of North Korean involvement in the attacks, however, determining conclusively who was behind the attack will require deep forensic and analytical work The simplicity and crude deployment of the worm has set off alarm bells within a security establishment that has been exposed as unprepared and under protected. It raises the question: What happened to all the funding that was supposed to be spent on sophisticated cyber security solutions that should have protected our critical government systems?