Korea Cyberattack

A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack is pretty much the internet equivalent of a barrage jammer... not terribly sophisticated, but almost sure to cause a fair amount of harm. Well, that's certainly what happened when North Korea someone as yet unproven let fly with DDoS attacks on a couple score of South Korean and American target sites.

Here's more on the story, from Yonhap News in English. From this article, there are links to some other reports (on the right side of the page, titled "News Focus") on what kind of vulnerabilities and problems this attack revealed.

As to the visible effect of the attacks...

The attacks left some government web sites and online shopping services down on Wednesday and access to some U.S. government sites from the country appeared to have been disabled, perhaps due to security measures in the United States that blocked access from South Korea due the attacks, experts told local media.

Heh. Perhaps.