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Security Blog
July 10, 2009
The Future of Cyber Warfare is Here - US and South Korean Government Web Sites Attacked
Over the past week, many US government Web sites such as the Whitehouse and Department of Defense plus a handful of well known commercial sites like Amazon.com, as well as well known sites in South Korea have been under siege from waves of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. The attacks first started to emerge on July 4th with varying degrees of success. Some sites such as the Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission were shutdown while others did not experience any interruption in service. Since then, there have been multiple waves of similar attacks, creating more chaos amongst many US and South Korean sites. There have been some reports of the attacks having North Korean origins, however they have been unconfirmed.
Security researchers have estimated that a botnet of approximately 60,000 compromised PCs carried out the attacks. Those PCs were infected with an updated version of the MyDoom virus.
What's even more interesting is that the virus downloads addition payload - one of which is a file that causes the infected PC to self destruct. Reports of PCs used in the attacks self destructing have already began to surface. The attacker(s) might be doing this to cover their tracks. With so many under-protected PCs throughout the world, there is only going to be more of such incidents. We'll continue to follow these events as they unfold in the coming days.
The following US Web sites were hit:
- travel.state.gov
- www.amazon.com
- www.dhs.gov
- www.dot.gov
- www.nasdaq.com
- www.nsa.gov
- www.nyse.com
- www.state.gov
- www.whitehouse.gov
- travel.state.gov
- finance.yahoo.com
- www.washingtonpost.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.ftc.gov
- www.ustreas.gov
- www.faa.gov
- www.usbank.com
- www.usps.gov
- www.voa.gov
- www.voanews.com
- www.usauctionslive.com
- www.defenselink.mil
- www.marketwatch.com
- www.site-by-site.com
Posted by: Pete at 2:53 PM
Categories: General , Malware , Viruses
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