In addition to ramping up its rhetoric in recent weeks, North Korea appears to be actively going after their neighbors to the south.
It shouldn’t really come as a tremendous shock given their willingness to detonate nuclear weapons underground multiple times, in clear violation of international law, or fire off ballistic missiles around or over numerous countries in the region. While granted these launches have been far from successful, they still make millions of people nervous as hell each time they have to beat their chest with these displays.
A spokesman for South Korea’s Internet agency said today that six computers in North Korea were identified as the source of the attack, according to The Guardian. Those computers used more than 1,000 IP addresses from across the world to infect 48,000 PCs and servers at several South Korean banks and broadcasters.
Originally, South Korea had suggested that these attacks had originated in China only to recently back-peddle on this suggestion. The reason for the accusation is that they believed they had traced an IP address back to Mainland China only to later find that the IP address in question was actually used internally by one of the targeted banks and just happened to match another in China.
Officials also suggested that the espionage division of the North Korean Armed Forces had been planning the attack for somewhere in the neighborhood of eight months.
“We saw evidence that the attack was extremely carefully prepared,” the spokesman said at a news briefing today.
South Korea’s foreign minister said today he believes the possibility of a missile attack from the North is “very high.”
These accusations and others will certainly do nothing towards easing the tensions between these two countries technically still at war since the North’s invasion of South Korea over 60 years ago. No armistice or treaty was ever signed between the two in 1953, fighting simply took a long vacation.
Unfortunately, with tensions and states of readiness this high it’s forgivable to believe that it is only a matter of time before this war of words and cyber-attacks lead to a disastrous mistake or overreaction that could once again bring war to the region, a war that will see large scale death and destruction no matter the perceived victor.
