|
IT firm helps fight global cyberattacks
Vietnamese security vendor Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis) has become the first security company in the world to provide vital information to investigators searching for the perpetrators of recent cyberattacks that crippled websites in the US and South Korea.
On Tuesday, the company, an arm of the Ha Noi-based Polytechnic, said it has identified a master command-and-control server used to coordinate the denial-of-service attacks that took down major government sites.
A command-and-control server is used to distribute instructions to zombie PCs, which form a botnet that can be used to bombard portals with traffic, rendering them useless.
It said the server was hosted on an IP (Internet Protocol) address used by Global Digital Broadcast, an IP TV technology company based in Brighton, England.
That server sent instructions to eight other command-and-control servers used in the attacks.
Bkis, which managed to gain control over two of the eight servers, said 166,908 hacked computers in 74 countries were used in the attacks and were programmed to get new instructions every three minutes.
Nguyen Minh Duc, Bkis senior security director, said in a telephone interview that Global Digital Broadcast had confirmed that the IP address belonged to it.
But the master server is not in the UK but in Miami, the US, according to Tim Wray, one of the owners of Global, who spoke to IDG News Service on Tuesday evening.
It belongs to Digital Latin America (DLA), one of Global’s partners, which encodes Latin American programming for distribution over devices like set-top boxes.
"New programmes are taken from satellite and encoded before being sent over the VPN (Virtual Private Network) to the UK where Global distributes the content," Wray told IDG News Service.
The VPN connection made it appear the master server belonged to Global when it actually was in DLA’s Miami data centre, he said.
Duc of the Bkis said Global rents its IP address out to DLA.
The Korea Times said the Korea Communications Commission, South Korea’s broadcasting and telecom regulator, backed Bkis’s report and said law enforcement authorities were seeking co-operation with the British Government to investigate the attack source. The Seoul-based newspaper also quoted Korean authorities as saying Bkis’s report was "credible."
vietnamnews
|
