 |
Staff Reporter
The powerful Internet attack that pummeled the country last week targeted computers. But televisions and phones could be next, according to the head of the country's biggest online security firm.
Government officials Monday all but declared the death of the massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that overwhelmed nearly 80,000 computers at local offices and homes.
However, Phillip Kim, the chief executive of AhnLab, which had a crucial role in combating the latest cyber attack, expressed caution about the country lowering its guard, considering that the functional intentions of the malicious programs remain unclear.
Internet attacks around the world are becoming more organized and sophisticated, Kim said, and the initiators of the recent DDoS attacks had detailed knowledge of Korean networks and online monitoring systems.
``We have yet to figure out how the malicious programs reached the computers and what their exact intentions were. This is fueling the concerns that there might be another wave of attacks and I am worried too,'' Kim said in a Seoul news conference Monday.
``The hackers behind the recent attack showed some impressive skills, including identifying the computers that were most vulnerable and pinpointing the malicious programs toward them.
``They also had a deep understanding of our equipment and how security companies like us design our monitoring systems ― they knew exactly how we programmed our traffic threshold.''
In other words, the hackers programmed the malicious codes to control the traffic sent by each infected computer to stay below a certain level in order to stay undetected, although this meant that they needed more computers to pull off the job.
``It's true that the hackers had great knowledge about how things work around here, but that doesn't mean they are likely to be Koreans. We believe that foreign hacker organizations already have successfully secured a wealth of personal information, and also details about our equipment and network infrastructure,'' Kim said.
The advancing skill of cyber criminals could become even more of a problem with the trend toward digital convergence, Kim said, with a broader range of devices, most notably televisions and phones, being plugged into the Web.
``Televisions and phones today are connected to the network and are designed with the same structure as computers, so you have to say they are potential targets,'' Kim said.
Kim said Internet network operators, such as KT, have boosted their security measures since the ``Great Internet Disruption of 2003,'' when servers were crippled by a DDoS attack initiated by SQL slammer worms. However, the recent DDoS attack exposed the low-level of awareness on the part of end-users, Kim said.
``Hackers always change their attacking patterns. This time they used DDoS to overwhelm Web sites, but next time they could organize an attack to steal crucial information,'' he said.
``The average person here still has a low level of security awareness and this makes the country vulnerable to these cyber attacks.''
The Korea Communications Commission (KCC) said that the DDoS attacks have ceased, with the traffic of the targeted Web sites returning to normal and the examining of the malicious software revealing no signs of another attack.
About 99 percent of the 78,000 infected computers have been cleaned, the KCC said.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
