Cyber attacks on US, S. Korea aimed at registering protest: Experts

NEW DELHI - The latest cyber attacks against South Korean and American websites are more intended at venting anger than causing damage.

The attacks on Estonia and South Korea, for instance, might best be thought of as the 21st-century equivalent of banging a shoe at the United Nations.

“These are more like protests in the street, where an angry mob might burn you in effigy. If your motives are to register your frustration or anger, this is very commonly used throughout the world to do that,” The Christian Science Monitor quoted Jose Nazario, a cybersecurity expert with the Boston-area Arbor Networks, as saying.

The type of attack involved - a “distributed denial of service attack” (DDOS) - is neither terribly sophisticated, nor, in this case, particularly damaging, say cybersecurity experts.

More worrisome attacks tend to be stealthy, and involve breaking into machines and either taking information or taking control.

Denial of service attacks often have the opposite goal: To make a highly visible political point.

According to Nazario, the selection of targets and the timing indicate Pyongyang’s involvement in attacks, which began on July 4, coinciding with North Korea’s launch of missiles in a show of international defiance.

Many experts are trying to trace the origins of the attacks, spread by a variant of the years-old MyDoom virus. But it’s notoriously hard to do that.

“We need to take into consideration that somebody’s kid across the world can cause us trouble, so we have to treat this as an international problem. I don’t think we should think of it as a military thing, period,” says Gadi Evron, a former Israeli government Internet security monitor. (ANI)