According to a new report, 40 South Korean websites came under a cyber crime attack by a computer virus, including the presidential Blue House, South Korea's biggest bank , a major online auction house, the Foreign Ministry, the two largest search engines in the country and Korean military website.
Although it was not immediately clear who has been behind the attack, the National Police Agency began investigating the assault that has been discovered by AhnLab, a leading Internet security firm based in Seoul.
Most computer analysts declared that the episode was a distributed denial of service cyber crime attack. Usually, in such cases, the infected computers also known as zombies try to access targeted websites at the same time in an attempt to overwhelm the sites with a surge of traffic that crashes their servers.
According to a statement released by a South Korean government official the computer system at the Blue House has not been damaged too bad. "We were attacked, but it was defended," the official declared. The Blue House and other agencies had already installed security countermeasures after they had faced a major cyber crime attack that had chaotic effects in July 2009.
Computer analysts said the two attacks had similarities, including the targeted sites. However, they have the virus on the night before and managed to distribute a free anti-virus solution for downloading. They also added that they have detected plans for a second cyber crime attack and even if widespread damage was averted there ave been several hard disk drives that have been destroyed and certain files that might have been corrupted.
