Thursday, July 09, 2009

Are the Koreans behind the latest hack, or was it Jack Bauer?

So...South Korea and the United States are under cyberattack today. Of course everyone is rushing to blame North Korea. However...if I have learned anything from watching 24...this is exactly how to set North Korea up if you want the US to go to war with them (thanks Jack Bauer!).

This is a developing story...more details coming soon I am sure. Was it done by the government of North Korea or another country, or just citizens? How much damage was really done? It looks like the FTC web site was shut down, as well as the site for the US Treasury. Could be much worse.

This is the wave of the future, folks. As we depend more on technology, it will cripple us to lose it. If all cell phones went down, how many people even know where the nearest pay phone is?

AP Article

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Received this link from Alberto:

http://preview.tinyurl.com/lhvygb

It seems that the there is code that can overwrite an infected PC's hard disk, making the OS unable to boot.

Anonymous said...

http://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/NJ/PATERSON/

Professor Cameron said...

That's an nice link for the payphones...there are two problems though, directly from the pages:

"Phone numbers on these pages are believed to either be or to have been at one time those of public telephones (payphones) in the United States. It is highly likely, and in fact virtually guaranteed that these pages contain errors."

"Most payphones are disconnected or reject incoming calls, but have fun trying!"

I took a quick glance at the list for my town, and near the top of the list is a payphone at a club that burned down about 5 years ago. This is, however, better than nothing and brings up the point that why does a third party compile and publish this list rather than the phone companies?