Several government, banking, and media Web sites in South Korea were attacked on July 9 in the third wave of a distributed denial of service attack that has targeted sites in that country and the United States since early July. The most recent attack began early Thursday evening, when the MyDoom virus that hackers had planted in thousands of personal and business computers ordered the machines to begin attacking sites belonging to South Korea’s Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry, and parliament, among others. During the attack, the sites slowed down or temporarily stopped working. According to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service, the level of the attacks was extremely organized and well planned. The agency said this could mean the attacks were the work of “certain organizations or state.” Meanwhile, the attackers seem to have stopped targeting U.S.-based sites. FireEye’s Alex Lanstein says the attackers removed U.S. government and commercial Web sites from their list of targeted sites on July 7 after those sites began filtering and blocking attack traffic. Experts say the MyDoom virus, which first surfaced in 2004, has been frequently reprogrammed to target new sites. “This wasn’t a computer program thrown out into the wild,” says CloudShield’s Peder Jungck. “Someone was actively monitoring its success and changing the targets based on the response. There’s a human on the other side playing chess with us.”
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