Slashdot Mirror
Possible Cyber Attack Against South Korean Banks and TV Stations
B3ryllium writes "At least four broadcasters and two banks in South Korea are reporting massive computer accessibility issues, saying that their networks are 'paralyzed' by what looks like a cyber attack. Additional reports from Twitter suggest that hundreds of computers in the country powered off simultaneously at 2:20am, and reported "Boot device not found" errors. South Korea's military has upgraded its "Information Operation Condition (INFOCOM)" level from Level 4 to Level 3 in response to this situation."
South Korea citizens breathed a collective sigh of relief upon learning that battle.net servers were unaffected by the outage.
According to additional reports throughout the day, malware was transmitted through patch management servers, affecting hundreds of PCs at the broadcasters and banks. The malware was designed to target the master boot records of the computers, taking them offline, and according to another article, local security experts say that this is an example of an advanced persistent threat.
It was merely an attempt to contain Gangnam Style.
Nk gets its help from its partner; China. I would not be surprised to find that the bios/eeprom was shipped with back doors.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm intrigued to know whether given the closed nature of North Korea and it's poor education systems whether it has the ability to perform this type of attack entirely indigenously or whether China has helped or given some kind of training on this.
I'm usually one to defend China as I think the threat of it is normally quite overblown, but I'm having a hard time believing North Korea has the talent to have done this entirely by itself.