North Korean Cyber Attack- i told you so

Yesterday while the planet was mesmerized by the spectacle in Staples Center, the news media slowly put our a story that caught my attention, about how the South Korean government, and ours, had been targeted for a cyber attack. I suggested maybe it was the North Koreans (duh) Today i was proved correct:

"WASHINGTON – U.S. authorities on Wednesday eyed North Korea as the origin of the widespread cyber attack that overwhelmed government Web sites in the United States and South Korea, although they warned it would be difficult to definitively identify the attackers quickly.

The powerful attack that targeted dozens of government and private sites underscored how unevenly prepared the U.S. government is to block such multipronged assaults.

While Treasury Department and Federal Trade Commission Web sites were shut down by the software attack, which lasted for days over the holiday weekend, others such as the Pentagon and the White House were able to fend it off with little disruption.

The North Korea link, described by three officials, more firmly connected the U.S. attacks to another wave of cyber assaults that hit government agencies Tuesday in South Korea. The officials said that while Internet addresses have been traced to North Korea, that does not necessarily mean the attack involved the Pyongyang government"

OK, wait a minute

Our government is saying that the attack probably came from North Korea, but it wasn't the North Korean's??

That is possible, with IP spoofing and redirection of traffic, but how likely is it that the MOST paranoid nation on the planet would allow such a thing to happen? I sense a apology coming forth..from US!

"The widespread attack was "loud and clumsy," which suggests it was carried out by an unsophisticated organization, said Amit Yoran, chief executive at NetWitness Corp. and the former U.S. government cybersecurity chief. "This is not the elegance we would expect from sophisticated adversaries."

OK, loud and clumsy still kicked serveral servers offline for DAYS.  Cyber espionage relies on elegance, loud and clumsy tells me they didnt care, the intent was to see what they could do.

Denial of service attacks: overloading a computer system so that it can no longer function. This is the method allegedly used by the Russians to disrupt the Estonian government computers in May 2007.

Chinese Cyber war tactics call for gaining the intiative early, crippling the target nation infrastructure, targeting agencies and institutions that are softer targets; as the targets go offline, the communication lines to them become saturated, slowing down the local Wide Area Network; as the WAN becomes congested, the traffic becomes re routed, cascading into other portions of the web. Eventually vast areas could experience the equivalent to a power brown out as internet traffic slows to dialup speed.

Just know that the Pentagon uses more than 5 million computers on 100,000 networks in 65 countries.

Sami Saydjari, who has been working on cyber defence systems for the Pentagon since the 1980s, told Congress in testimony on April 25 that a mass cyber attack could leave 70 per cent of the US without electrical power for six months.

Oh, but lets not worry ourselves, Obie will talk them out of it...yeah, right