North Korea escalates prank war

Well they finally figured it out. Remember how pissed we all were over the weekend when we tried to access the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, and Transportation Department web sites and found our ability to load them up difficult and scattershot? How all you heard during fireworks was stuff like "Where the hell else am I going to get to read Tim Geithner's blog", "It just isn't the same without hot dogs, fireworks, and up to date press releases from the Transportation Department", and "This holiday is barely worth celebrating without the ability to check out the FAQ on the Secret Service's website"? Well, now we know who ruined our nation's birthday: North Korea.

South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. government Web sites, aides to two lawmakers said Wednesday.
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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 Korea Information Security Agency also attributed the attacks to denial of service.

DoS attacks are when a number of people go to a website at the same time, causing an overload to the servers. Sometimes it can happen when a popular blogger links to you (something we've never had to experience), or when it's a coordinated attack. This vicious NK attack swelled some sites traffic to 9 times their usual load. 9 times! This had lead to experts in multiple articles on this to call the attack "sophisticated", which leads me to believe they aren't actually experts. Atrios or Daily Kos are probably going to do it once or twice today with a link and a sentence telling you to click said link. Making a website hard to load doesn't equal heinously sophisticated cyber-terror.

But nevertheless this is war! We're coming for you Kimbo! You think your DoS attacks are funny, just wait until we start up the LOLJong-Il site, start sending out embarrassing e-mails from your Gmail account, and hack your Twitter feed (TallBoyNK). My the CIA will escalate into putting itching powered in your onesies, ordering multiple pizzas to your house, killing you in a missile attack, or dyeing the water in your pool blue. You don't want to get into it with us.