Do you have North Korean Cyberwar Blues? The latest news is that, though the “attack” seems to be waning, the Evil Doers have one more trick up their sleeve: they’re going to delete all your data? Or are they?
SecureWorks, which is in the business of warning people about Internet-related security threats, says some of the PCs used in this great North Korean Botnet of Doom are infected with a version of the mydoom virus. And, sometime today, these PCs are scheduled to begin erasing the data of the hard drive on which they reside.
And, just as I write this, it does look like some of these PCs are beginning to self-destruct.
What to make of all this? I don’t know. I use a Mac. (Hopefully Chrome OS takes off in numbers; the Internet is suffering under the weight of all these Windows viruses and whatnot.)
You can follow the news, as it breaks, on Twitter.
I’m on an XP machine at work right now and I can honestly say its not weighing down the internet with any viruses – nor has it ever.
Its the stupid people who use computers that “weigh things down”, because they’re the ones with the infected systems. Windows is still the dominant OS out there, and the one purchased by virtually everyone who doesn’t know anything about a computer. So its the vulnerable platform.
Its also the OS used quite effectively by a good many people, such as myself – who can get everything done they need to get done, enjoy the experience, and not have their computers crash every day. If Macs were priced on par with Windows machine, dumb people would buy them too and bad things would happen.
The North Korean angle is really silly.
Even Brian Chess said, this looks like a North Korean cyber attack. Really? I did’ t realize there was such a long history of North Korean cyber attacks to compare this one to. Do they even have computers in North Korea? ;)
The impact was that a few government websites were down for a bit. In perspective, it’s a small annoyance to some, but not the end of the world.
I’m more curious as to why a minor, brute force, run-of-the-mill DoS attack has been turned into such a big deal and blamed on “axis of evil” member North Korea.
A just as plausible situation is that the DoS attack is real, is not “state sponsored,” and has been used to aid one TLA or another in the cyber security responsibility battle in Washington.
Another plausible situation is that the attack is a “false flag” type operation by a state or non-state actor.
Between this and the obviously fake ssh 0day panic this week, I’m glad it’s Friday. Hopefully sanity returns next week.