State cyberattack ‘ongoing’; N. Korea suspicions grow

A State Department spokesman said Wednesday that a cyberattack launched against its website is “still ongoing” as more fingers pointed toward North Korea in the denial-of-service assault on numerous government sites.

Ian Kelly told reporters at the State Department briefing that the attack had started against the state.gov site on July 5.

{mosads}”It’s still ongoing, but I’m told that it’s much reduced right now,” Kelly said, noting that the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team was working on the problem. “But I think, as you know, the State Department wasn’t the only target of these attacks.”

Targets included the websites of the White House, Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. Government websites in South Korea — the office of the president, the National Assembly, Defense and Foreign ministries — were also affected.

Yonhap news agency reported that South Korea’s spy service believes North Korea or sympathizers were behind the attacks. The National Intelligence Service is to report its findings to a South Korean government committee on Thursday.

The intelligence agency released a statement Wednesday saying that the “elaborately planned” attacks appeared to originate from “a certain organization or state.”

The Korea Herald reported that the virus had been tracked to a house in eastern Seoul, according to the Cyber Terrorism Response Center of the National Police Agency.

By early Wednesday evening, the Associated Press was citing anonymous U.S. officials as saying Internet addresses have been traced back to North Korea. Only a handpicked sliver of the population is allowed access to the heavily censored Internet in North Korea; even the official state Korean Central News Agency operates off a Japanese domain.

Officially, the U.S. government didn’t reveal much about the probe. “We’re investigating, but we can’t confirm the source of attacks yet,” Kelly said.

Some members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee were sounding the alarm Wednesday, though, about the cyberattacks that came just days after North Korea staged a Fourth of July launch of seven ballistic missiles into the Sea of Japan.

“It’s a gigantic wakeup call and shows us how vulnerable we are,” Rep. John Boozman (R-Ark.) told The Hill. “If they can get into these systems, what about things like our banking interests?”

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) also voiced broad concern about the ability of North Korea and China, which employs a growing army of hackers, to access U.S. computer systems.

{mosads}”It’s a big problem,” Rohrabacher said. “I personally know of several technologies that could solve this problem and I am frustrated personally and wondering why these technologies have not been brought into play.” When pressed by The Hill, the congressman declined to go into further detail.

Calling North Korea one of the “two most dangerous regimes in the world” (the other being Iran), Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), who has been to North Korea twice, told The Hill that the communist nation “needs constant monitoring.”

“I think the regime is obviously irrational and dangerous,” Engel said. “It’s a scary place.”

Engel advocated increasing U.N. sanctions against North Korea and employing the help of China and Russia to rein in the regime.

“It’s worrisome, because [the recent attacks] are what we know, but what about stuff that we don’t know?” Engel said. “They are a society that’s starving to death but at the same time have all this top-notch technology.”