The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Row over Korean election DDoS attack heats up

Ruling party staffer accused of disrupting Seoul mayoral by-election

Regcast training : Hyper-V 3.0, VM high availability and disaster recovery

A political scandal is brewing in Korea over alleged denial of service attacks against the National Election Commission (NEC) website.

Police have arrested the 27-year-old personal assistant of ruling Grand National Party politician Choi Gu-sik over the alleged cyber-assault, which disrupted a Seoul mayoral by-election back in October.

However, security experts said that they doubt the suspect, identified only by his surname "Gong", had the technical expertise or resources needed to pull off the sophisticated attack. Rather than knocking the NEC website offline, the attack made a portion of the website – offering information on voting booth locations – inaccessible.

Despite this issue resembling a technical fault rather than a DDoS attack, the incident is being treated as a criminal attack by the police, who have arrested Gong and charged him along with three others.

Police said that the "attack", which lasted for more than two hours, was launched using a total of 10 wireless internet connections, including five T-Login and five WiBro connections. Police speculated that this was either a way of making it harder to thwart the attack or an attempt to complicate police efforts to investigate the assault. A police official told Korean daily newspaper The HankYoreh: “This went beyond simply using zombie PCs and wireless internet to launder IP addresses. It was a sophisticated attack.”

Opposition groups argue that the early morning timing of the attack was carefully designed to disrupt the voting of young commuters, who are more likely to vote for opposition (liberal) candidates. They want to force a parliamentary audit or special prosecutor’s investigation if the police investigation fails to get to the bottom of the attack.

Gong continues to protest his innocence, a factor that has led opposition politicians to speculate that he is covering up for higher-ranking officials who ordered the attack.

Democratic Party politician Baek Won-woo told The HankYoreh: “We need to determine quickly and precisely whether there was someone up the line who ordered the attack, and whether there was compensation.” ®

Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Thank you for the info!

1
0

Apparently not

Park Won-Soon won the election. He's an independent outsider, with a lot of support from the young (20s-30s) demographic. The GNP is the big incumbent party, and it's one of their staffers accused in this case (and possibly acting on orders from higher up).

1
0

Follow the money

http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_editorial/510303.html

"The police have admitted that around the time the National Election Commission website was disabled by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, a large amount of money changed hands among Grand National Party figures who were subsequently arrested in connection with it. [...]"

0
0

More from The Register

 breaking news
NSA PRISM snoop-gate: Won't someone think of the children, wails Apple
10,000 things probed, mostly about missing kids, Alzheimer patients, we're told
 breaking news
Number of cops abusing Police National Computer access on the rise
Only a telegram from the Queen can get you off it
 breaking news
NSA PRISM-gate: Relax, GCHQ spooks 'keep us safe', says Cameron
Whatever they are up to, it's all above board, we're told
PRISM snitch claims NSA hacked Chinese targets since 2009
Snowden suddenly looks safer in Hong Kong after revelations
 breaking news
US chief spook: Look, we only want to spy on 6.66 BEELLLION of you
Americans assured they are not in the NSA's sights
Flash flaw potentially makes every webcam or laptop a PEEPHOLE
But it's a Google problem - Chrome only, insists Adobe
Speech-to-text drives motorists to distraction
Will talking to you mean I crash into that car up ahead, Siri?
DHS warns of vulns in hospital medical equipment
Has your doctor's anasthesia machine been hacked?
 breaking news
'BadNews is malware' says outfit that found it
Google says code harmless but Lookout says code base is evolving
Panda-peddlers cuffed for chess gambling gambit
More porridge on the menu for Chinese coders after second offence