Did North Korea Launch a Cyber Attack?

Its possible, but the sheer audacity of the attack is stunning if true. A more interesting question is who gave them the capability to carry out cyber-warfare. Is North Korea a proxy to probe our defenses or simply a way to test. Perhaps they came up with it on their own. Of course its possible the story is false as well.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces in South Korea committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. Web sites, a lawmaker's aide said Wednesday.

In the U.S., the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department Web sites were all down at varying points over the U.S. Independence Day holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government.

Others familiar with the U.S. outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government Web sites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

The sites of 11 South Korean organizations including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 U.S. sites suffered similar problems.

On Wednesday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of South Korean lawmakers it believes that North Korea or North Korean sympathizers in the South ''were behind'' the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed on the information.

The aide spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the information. He refused to allow the name of the lawmaker he works for to be published.The National Intelligence Service -- South Korea's main spy agency -- said it couldn't immediately confirm the report.

By the way this little nugget is in the story:

Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the South Korean sites were accessed from overseas. Yonhap, citing an unnamed prosecution official, said the cyber attack used a method common to Chinese hackers.

It was the Chinese who allegedly gave us the ghost net, so their computer hacking skills are quite good.