Cyber Attacks Subside but Gov’t Stays Vigilant

Distributed denial-of-access services attacks, or DDoS, effectively disappeared over the weekend but authorities remained on standby.

Police are examining “zombie” PCs that they secured by mobilizing more analysts.

The Korea Broadcasting Commission and the Korea Information Security Agency yesterday said traffic to Web sites damaged by DDoS attacks have returned to normal. The agency has analyzed 22 types of malicious code samples from 23,000 zombie PCs, but found no files containing a command for additional attacks.

Nevertheless, the two bodies stood by for a possible fourth wave of cyber attacks. Major domestic and U.S. sites have suffered three attacks since Tuesday last week.

An official from the cyber terrorism response center at the National Policy Agency said, “We have secured 27 zombie PCs. We believe that we have enough zombie PCs required for analysis, so we’re doing our best to speed up our analysis.”

Seven cyber crime analysts from regional policy departments were added to the response center, and the number of staff in charge of DDoS attacks was raised there to 31.

The Strategy and Finance Ministry will also advance as early as possible the establishment of a finance and economy cyber security center, which it had planned to launch early next year.

smhong@donga.com firedy@donga.com