White House, Pentagon, South Korea websites targeted in coordinated cyber attack

[Naveed Yaseen]

WASHINGTON (July 09 2009): Around a dozen US government websites, including those of the White House and the Pentagon, were targeted in a co-ordinated cyberattack which also struck sites in South Korea, computer security experts said Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that US government and private sector websites had come under so-called "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack but declined to identify any of the targeted sites.

A denial of service attack attempts to paralyse a website by flooding it with traffic from an army of malware-infected computers known as a "botnet." "It was a pretty massive attack," Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer for the private SANS Internet Storm Center, said of the Internet assault which began over the weekend.

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