North Korea behind denial of service attacks?

Reports today are indicating that several South Korean Web sites have been attacked again. Several officials have voiced speculation that North Korea was behind both today's denial of service attacks and last week's wave of outages that hit sites in both the U.S. and South Korea. No comment from Pyongyang.

The official news agency in South Korea says that today, seven sites - one belonging to the government and the others to private entities - were attacked.

The U.S. targets included the White House, Pentagon, Treasury Department and the Nasdaq stock exchange.

These attacks demonstrate the vulnerability of the global government and commercial web infrastructure to outside attack. The Obama Administration may want to reconsider the position of cyberczar and elevate it to Cabinet-level status.

For more:

FT.com / Global Economy - Fresh cyber attacks hit S Korea and US
New York Times
MSNBC
Wall Street Journal

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Security Bits and Bytes

• The Wall Street Journal reports that the CEO of Heartland Payment Systems "gets religion" on security. You'll recall that Heartland reported what has been called the "largest security breach ever" earlier in the year.
• Researchers have uncovered a new platform used by cybercriminals to buy and sell batches of zombie PCs and other tools used to carry out attacks. The scheme is exposed in detail by Elinor Mills here and Robert Westervelt here.
• Reports from Illinois state auditors indicate that the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation cannot account for 52 computers. The department is responsible for regulating the banking and insurance industries as well as several professions, including accounting, medicine, and engineering. The agency cannot say if the missing computers held confidential information. The machines may have been transferred to other agencies, but there are no records indicating such transfers.