Internet Alert: The North Korean Cyber Threat

North and South Korea are always on the verge of war. Both countries are driven with different foreign policy ideologies that move them to constantly target each other. It’s no wonder that when South Korea experienced cyber attacks, the country was quick to point an accusing finger at its long-time enemy. There have been speculations that the virtual offensives to South Korea from July 2009 to March 2011 are actually North Korean war drills.

According to the vice president of threat research for McAfee Labs, Dmitri Alperovitch, the attacks may be a test from North Korea on what damage cyber weapons can do on South Korea. He added that offensives through cyberspace can be a threat to national security. McAfee used the March 2011 South Korean cyber attack as its basis for analysis. During this time, online users from South Korea experienced traffic due to “denial of service”.

Last year, the security software company released a document that said “the attackers likely built the army of computers that launched the attacks by infecting healthy PCs with malicious software at a popular South Korean file-sharing site”. Once the PC was contaminated with the virus, the report further stated, it became a part of a group of captured computers (also called botnets).

The Intel Corp. subsidiary explained that botnets were used by the cyber terrorists to inflict damage on South Korea’s 40 websites. They encrypted a specific software that is difficult to understand. The purpose for this is to make sure that IT experts will have a hard time figuring out the problem. “It was a very rapid operation — very constrained with specific goals. The intent was to see what level of damage you can do in a very rapid time period,” Alperovitch said. This means that everything from basic programs all the way to business-critical applications like the company’s copy of Microsoft Dynamics CRM could be compromised… and the user, or even the best IT technicians, wouldn’t even know it until the intruders chose to make their hack overt.

McAfee argued that a botnet cannot normally direct infected computer systems to inflict harm upon themselves. Thus, Alperovich assumed, the clear intention of these cyber war drills was to find out how to infiltrate government websites in case of war, but that businesses are not altogether excluded from the equation.

North Korea has no comment on McAfee’s assumption. However, this begs the question: Is South Korea helpless against cyber terrorism?