South Korea Plans Better Defenses for DDoS Attacks

South Korea has taken recent DDoS attacks against governmental websites very seriously and plans to start work on strengthening defenses against such threats.

Yonhap news agency reports that the Ministry of Public Administration and Security intends to place all city intranets and the country's entire governmental computer network under the protection of a system designed to fend off DDoS attacks by shutting off heavy traffic.

There are also plans to build a system for sharing information about malware threats, which will see the participation of professionals from the private sector.

In addition, the ministry plans to hire 60 security experts and train them overseas in how to deal with DDoS attacks. They will then be deployed in both central and local administrations.

A research team will be created to investigate various types of DDoS techniques and propose possible counter measures.

The announced measures come after earlier this month around thirty governmental and private websites were targeted in attacks launched from a botnet of around 50,000 infected computers.

This is not the first time when South Korea reacts to DDoS. Back in July 2009, many government and financial websites were attacked in a similar manner.

However, because many of the infected computers involved were located in the country, Internet connectivity was crippled in major cities.

Following the attack, the authorities launched a major campaign to help people clean their machines and educate them about malware threats.

The Korea Internet Security Center (KrCERT/CC) was tasked with building so called virtual DDoS shelters which automatically provide networks with spare IP addresses in case of attacks.

It's worth pointing out that South Korea has the best broadband speeds in the world. According to the latest "State of the Internet" report from Akamai, the average speed in the country is 14.6 Mbps, compared to 3.9 Mbps in US.