I live here in South Korea next door to the DMZ. If this is a cyber war, it hasn't been very disruptive yet. I'm having no trouble accessing any of the standard Korean websites that were/are said to be under attack (Naver, KEB). My $35/month internet access package is today what it was last week - the fastest unlimited internet in the world.
What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect personal computers here.
If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website, I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service, National Pension, National Health, etc).
Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.
We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest version. Seriously.
Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.
Five years ago, when I lived in South Korea next door to the DMZ, I got the fastest unlimited internet in the world for $35 a month, but all the computers I saw ran Windows 98. Now, they still use IE6? Do you think that years-long lag behind the state of the art can be permanently overcome, or just temporarily bypassed?
The average Korean's internet usage seems to be stuck in something of a walled garden - Naver/Daum/CyWorld/"Cafes"... and that's pretty much it. Most folks around here like the comfort of treading in groups, always where others have trod before. I don't think that is likely to change any time soon, probably about the same time travel agents start to see a decline in package tours in favor of individual trips. In other words: probably never.
On the other hand, Koreans are never behind the state of the art - they do relish having the latest and greatest things to show off. You can count on one hand the number of second-hand stores in Seoul, mostly because new=good.
They simply have no problem conforming to the flock, which, in the case of internet security, is rarely a smart move. When eventually some high-level government official or TV channel will point this out, suddenly everyone will take notice, and they'll all move on, as a flock, to the next thing, and the next, and next.
I've thought of becoming a member of the Korea Friends association so I could post there and slowly build up a trusted account to start subtly questioning things, but that don't want to get myself on a list of supporters of known terrorist states.
I understand that North Korean government has a motive, but do they have enough technological ability to orchestrate such an attack? A country full of starving people and with one website opened a few years ago? I highly doubt it.
On the other hand I doubt any of the other few possible states (China or Russia) would turn to such demonstration of force against US unless they had something to gain from it.
What's left then? Some crazy group like 4chan or some errorists? They would be shouting "we did it" before you even heard the news about the attacks.
I thought they were a backwards agricultural communist country with no electricity and now they launch cyberwar? Maybe their media is not the only biased one.
North Korea? Cyber war? This is crap. People in North Korea starve! They have no cars, not even shampoo. They have no resources or man power to start anything "cyber".
Journalists love to use the term, but what is a "cyber war" anyway? The first thing I think about is a bunch of script kiddies trying to take over each other's IRC channels with netsplits and operator status, and trying to erase each other's hard drives with Sub7.
Well, a cyber-strike would be a coordinated digital attack meant to achieve a strategic goal by force. So a cyber war, by extension, would be a prolonged exchange of such strikes.
So this could plausibly be one such strike in an on-going conflict that is far more 'real' than script kiddie squabbling.
Could have been a penetration attack to steal technological secrets.
Could have been a penetration to plant backdoors/loggers for later use.
Could be service disruptions to hamper a particular project.
(Take down the network serving No Fly List sorts of updates to get a possibly-compromised agent on a plane or over a border.)
Could just be a 'recon' attack to see what we have connected and how we react. A sort of digital equivalent to the kinds of 'disruption' that we financed and supported from Okinawa toward China for many years.
But I personally find it hard to believe that any state-sponsored cyber 'strike' would be limited to a DDoS on public-facing services. That sounds like a smokescreen at best.
Maybe it is crap, but this has nothing to do with the people of North Korea. It's (allegedly) their government. The one that also has the ability to manufacture and launch rockets. How many bottles of shampoo could you buy with that?
Yeah, they can fire a few rockets per year and most probably that's the main reason they starve as they use up all of their resources and scientists for that. NK is one of the poorest countries in the world. I don't believe the North Korea hype.
What I can say is that we need to make it much more difficult to infect personal computers here.
If you show me a Korean government or non-trivial Korean corporate website, I'll show you a website that uses at least 3 activeX controls and is optimized for IE6. Most public computers and the majority of personal computers I've used here have been running IE6 or 7. I'll admit that in Seoul and larger cities like Pusan, Ilsan, and Gwangju, you'll sometimes catch people using Macbooks at Starbucks. Score one for security via obscurity, but non-IE folks can't use ANY banking website or government site (National Tax Service, National Pension, National Health, etc).
Even though I'm in the "most wired country in the world", the majority of high schoolers, uni students, and business people I've interacted with aren't more tech-savvy than your average grandma. Everyone runs the dubious AhnLab Anti-virus as a mandatory magical medallion that came with the computer.
We need to do better - Korea's great ability is overnight change on a massive scale. The day President Lee announces that all browsers should be upgraded to the latest version is the day that all browsers will be upgraded to the latest version. Seriously.
Barring that kind of concerted effort, should the day come when I see a non-IE browser or something other than WinXP/Vista on a Korean adult's primary/only computer, I will eat this hat. This one, right here.