14 DAY TRIAL // The South Korean government has installed virtual shelters to protect business networks and critical Internet infrastructure from crippling DDoS attacks like the one that hit the country in 2009.
The new service was revealed by Jinhyun Cho, a senior researcher at Korea Internet Security Center (KrCERT/CC), who represented the organization at the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT) Cybersecurity Forum held in Australia earlier this week.
Cho said the government became much more involved in cyber security issues after a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack caused significant problems for both private and public organizations last year.
On July 4, 2009, a mysterious botnet comprised of tens of thousands of compromised computers hit 26 websites from US and South Korea.
The attacks caused serious disruptions in Korea, because the country was both the target and the origin of the attack traffic, harboring many of the infected systems.
"We were caught off-guard. It was on the mouths of everyone; the whole country knows what a DDoS attack is," Jinhyun Cho told ZDNet Australia.
Several hundred systems infected with the malware still exist in Korea today. They actually reactivated this year on the same date, but the few malicious traffic they sent did not have any impact.
Nevertheless, the government learned a lesson from the 2009 incident and has since invested significant resources into KrCERT and anti-DDoS technologies.
Cho explained that the new DDoS shelter service is a temporary measure, which involves Internet service providers assigning backup IP addresses to businesses in case of attack.
The researcher said that there hasn't been any major attack since last year, but noted that the number of smaller targeted ones has increased.
KrCERT has also implemented other known DDoS mitigation solutions like sinkholes or tarpits and is constantly advising the government on issues of cyber security.