Korea Becomes Haven for Hackers

The dominance of the Windows operating system coupled with a lack of interest in cyber security and state-of-the-art Internet infrastructure has made Korea a haven for hackers. Earlier this month hackers launched a powerful offensive on crucial Internet servers, which help manage global computer traffic. On Feb. 6, hackers flooded at least three of the 13 root domain name system (DNS) servers, which connect domain names with Internet protocol addresses to enable people to reach certain Web sites.

The attacks, dubbed distributed denial of service (DOS), caused a heavy inflow of Internet traffic directed at root servers.

DOS attackers seemed to have tried to bring the Internet pipeline to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic, shutting down all the networks.

They failed to disrupt the resilient Internet, which is safeguarded unless all 13 root servers and many more back-up servers are overwhelmed for about a week at the same time.

However, the accident spurred concerns about the security of cyber space across the world since it marked one of the most concerted attacks against the Internet's core facilities since a similar assault in 2002.

In particular, the attack seems to have involved South Korea as overseas media reported a majority of the rogue data originated from computers in the country.

Citing data from the North American Network Operators' Group, the Korean government confirmed 61 percent of the problematic data was traced to South Korea.