Over the Fourth of July holiday weekend, a wave of cyber assaults, or “denial of service” attacks, believed to have originated in North Korea, targeted a number of U.S. and South Korean government agency and commercial Web sites, causing some to suffer temporary outages. While there were no reported leaks of classified information or serious damage to networks, the organized assault underscored the conclusions of a recent White House cybersecurity review, namely, that the country’s digital infrastructure and domestic networks are not secure.
Indeed, the past six months have been a period of heightened concern about cybersecurity. The U.S. Department of Defense reported that a group of foreign hackers broke into two U.S. Army servers and exploited certain security vulnerabilities. The department also announced the formation of a new military cyber command. Moreover, President Barack Obama confirmed that hackers had accessed confidential files during his presidential campaign.
