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Journalism of Courage
America and other countries still have to fine-tune their cyber-defences to distinguish mere nuisances from real menaces. That,rather than any revelations about fiendish North Korean cyber-warfare,seems to be the upshot of the latest reported cyber-attack on South Korean and American websites.
Initially,it was reported that this was the first series of attacks to hit government websites in several countries simultaneously. Officials in both Seoul and Washington,DC,said they were suffering distributed denial of service overload known as DDOS in geekspeak. In these a computer is overwhelmed with bogus requests for a response sent from infected computers. American targets included sites at the Treasury,the Secret Service,and the Transportation Department; the South Korean list included the Defence Ministry,the National Assembly,the presidential Blue House and some banks. The timing felt eerie: attacks began on July 4th,Independence Day.
Yet little hard evidence has emerged about the seriousness of the attacks or their origin. Plenty of people may wish to spoil Americas national holiday. According to Arbor Networks,a security firm,the attack was comparatively small scale. Setting up an attack takes a competent cyber-hooligan five minutes work on a laptop. It is not just the bad guys who can do it: Iranian government sites have been attacked during the countrys recent unrest. A popular post on Twitter,a social networking site,was Iranelection Cyberwar Guide for Beginners,highlighting a site compiled by a sympathetic Welsh civil servant.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009
