July 4 which is celebrated by all the Americans as their Independence Day has another chapter added to it in the history of computer attacks. You will be surprised to know that several government websites got knocked off due to a unique widespread cyber attack. I am sure quite a few of us have experienced the problem of cyber attack at some point of time, but that is restricted to the private sites. This is one of its kind, where several official websites were down at varying points.
It came into notice when quite a few of the websites such as the Transportation Department, Federal Trade Commission, The Treasury Department and also the ones that are responsible for fighting against the cyber crime were all not opening up. As a matter of fact, there are various sites that have been experienced major problems even till Tuesday evening. This incident is being linked to the cyber attack on the government and private websites of South Korea.
Although, the US state officials are not ready to discuss this incident publically but spokeswomen from the “Homeland Security Department” has commented on the incident and said that US Computer Emergency and Readiness team has already issued a notice regarding this problem to the Federal department and to the other partner organizations. The team has further advised the necessary steps to be taken in order to mitigate problems or losses against any further such cyber attacks.
Although, the news is confirmed for various government websites but it is not really clear whether all the other federal sites have also been attacked by this computer attack. There are no two ways to the fact that this is quite a sophisticated and an unusually lengthy attack, as the government websites are still getting affected even three days after this attack. Till date none of the US officials have spoken on this issue openly as they have not been authorised to speak or comment on the severity of the matter.
A similar kind of cyber attack is suspected to have hit the government, public as well as bank websites on Tuesday. According to the spokeswoman of the Korea Information security, both the Us and Korean attacks appear to be linked in some way.
Since Tuesday evening, many of the websites which include Defence Ministry, Korea Exchange Bnk, Shinhan Bank, National Assembly and prudential Blue House either had no access or went completely down. Infact, two of the government officials have acknowledged to the fact that Secret service as well as the Treasury sites were also brought down and the agencies have been further working with their respective service providers to resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Ben Rushlo, who is the director of the Internet Technologies at Keynote Systems has called this to be a massive attack and mentioned that the problems related to the Transportation website had started on Saturday itself while the FTC website was also not working on Sunday and Monday.
It will not be wrong to state that computers of government officials are probed countless times in a day, where in many of them are just scans which do not trigger much of a problem. Infact, it has been mentioned in one of the reports that there have reported more than 16000 threats last year.
In today’s time, when computer has become an integral part of our system, it becomes highly imperative to take some serious measures should be taken to avoid any further problems or cyber attacks and the entire life comes to stand still.
