Via Wired:
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Michigan), the lead Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said the U.S. should conduct a "show of force or strength" against North Korea for a supposed role in a round of attacks that hit numerous government and commercial websites this week.
Yeah! Let's show those Koreans who's boss! If we don't act now, BABIES WILL DIE. (I wish I was making that up.)
There's just one little problem -- it doesn't look like the NK government had anything to do with it.
Let's review. Last week, there were a series of fairly primitive denial of service attacks against US and South Korean websites. Hoekstra and other warmongering types have claimed that it couldn't possibly be an amateur effort and that we need to retaliate. Except, as Wired covered earlier, it's a distinctly amateur looking attack. It didn't even do much real damage, serving mostly as an attention getter.
Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks says the code he examined, which was written in Visual C++, was compiled on July 3, a day before the first attacks. Although Stewart says analysis of the attack is still in its early stages, he concurs that the attacker’s motivation was fairly routine.
"Usually you see a DDoS attack against one or two sites and it will be for one of two reasons — they have some beef with those sites or they’re trying to extort money from those sites," he says. "To just attack a wide array of government sites like this, especially high-profile, just suggests that maybe the entire point is just to get attention to make some headlines rather than to actually do any kind of damage."
Then we have Michael Malone, an ABC News commentator, also calling for aggression. Malone immediately fails to understand how a textbook denial of service attack works:
Yeah, right. As if all of those millions of middle-class teenaged private owners of broadband connected laptops all over that electricity black hole called the People's Republic of North Korea spontaneously decided to hack the Web sites of another country's government and largest corporations.
Apparently nobody told the man about botnets. And then of course he has to terrify anyone reading:
When I read about a virus or worm crashing millions of computers and processors, I remind myself that some of those devices are embedded within or wired to things like fetal monitoring systems, surgical equipment, robotic bomb demolition equipment ... and ICBMs.
Have any hacks of the past killed babies or other vulnerable people? Will they?
Won't anyone think of the babies? And Malone can't be wrong:
Michael S. Malone is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter.
Please disregard any appearance that Malone has no clue what the hell he's talking about. There's no time for that; we have to stop the baby killing before it starts.