July 4th Hacker Attack Targeted Major U.S. Government Sites
South Korean government sites are also struck. Was North Korea to blame? Sure, most Americans spent last weekend grilling meat, drinking beer and blowing thing up. But the pasty, lonely few that spent Forth of July weekend browsing the websites of the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Transportation noticed something terribly amiss. Those websites, along with 12 other US government websites along with numerous South Korean government sites were loading very, very slowly, and sometimes, not at all. The culprit? A massive distributed denial-of-service attack. The DDoS attack shut down the websites of the President, Defense Ministry and the National Assembly of South Korea, as well as the websites of the American Federal Trade Commission, the Treasury Department and Secret Service. The attack were launched by a vast network of zombie computers that simultaneously started to monopolize the bandwidth of the targeted...