Top Japanese board 2ch remains inaccessible, due to the hacking efforts of Koreans outraged at criticism of their Olympic figure skating champion Kim Yu-Na.
The host afflicted, a US company, reports it intends to have the US government pursue a cyber-terrorism investigation.
Reportedly almost all of the dozens of servers and hundreds of boards which constitute 2ch have been taken offline as a result of the attack, apparently orchestrated through top Korean portal Naver (on a group called “The Just Terrorism Café”) in response to umbrage at isolated criticism of Olympic gold medal winning figure skater Kim Yu-Na.
A crude denial of service style attack is thought to be at fault – supposedly 50,000 people spamming F5 to reload pages succeeded in degrading network performance so greatly that the hosts had to take the servers offline to restore service levels for other customers at the data centre.
The host, Pacific Internet Exchange, reports that the servers will be put back online on the afternoon of the 2nd, and that other network damage has been contained.
Some of the Japanese language status reports speak of an “F5 attack,” an absurdly inefficient form of DoS, however later reports from the host claim it to be a more conventional DDoS attack using a legion of infected zombie bot computers.
Interestingly, as the host itself is a US corporation, it will reportedly be attempting to have US authorities investigate the incident as an act of cyber-terrorism against a US corporation.
Dear All,
We would like to update you regarding to the DDos attack which occurred on 2/28/10 6:35pm PST.
The incident was caused by mass amount of bot computers putting a stress on PIE.us’s network equipments.
Currently we have set an ACL (Access Control List) to IP’s from Korea and other countries but still do see a minor attack related to the incident.
This might possibly be caused by automated scripts and we are preparing to turn documentations and logs into local authorities as a cyber terrorism against U.S. corporation.
PIE bandwidth is now stable and we have lowered our level from Red to Orange.
Thank you,
PIE.us
Ryan Iwasaka
The irony of the attack is perhaps that hardly anyone on 2ch was even criticising Yu-Na (or more specifically, the judging of her performance), perhaps surprising in light of the near universal hatred for anything Korean usually expressed there – presumably this merely served as a convenient pretext for latent anti-Japanese sentiment, something many Koreans seem to harbour in excessive abundance.
Previous Korean attacks (of which there have been a number) against 2ch have generally flopped, being unable to take down more than a few of 2ch’s servers at once.
With 2ch still down, and thanks to an utterly ridiculous motive, Korea’s reputation for hyper-nationalism and a superficial hatred for most of its neighbours and even allies seems set to become even worse.
2ch decided to make a foray onto Korean sites by way of friendly reciprocity:
The Vippers also made an appearance:
It is perhaps also fitting that 2ch’s response (made just prior to the servers falling) be examined:
They’re just going to be hated even more now though…
This is why people dislike that crass nation of barbarians.
Honestly, they’re depressing. How tedious.
Can’t they stop these unsightly acts. They’re only going to disgrace Yu-Na even more.
This just looks like childish retaliation from here. Koreans are crude, and absolutely mad.
Don’t they realise they are going to wreck her image like this?
And after she won a gold medal…
Just… Terrorism? I don’t understand…
Be sure to arrest them!
Just block Korea from 2ch completely already!
Mixing up people with no connection with this at all and making enemies of them, really they are a bunch of idiots.
They don’t even realise how crude they are.
Koreans basically have no concept of shame.
Domestically, 2ch is just the equivalent of toilet graffiti. But internationally it seems to be quite the powerhouse…
It’s the response of an elementary schooler after being insulted.
Honestly, I think everyone would rather Korea just go back to being a hermit kingdom.
Don’t you even know Japanese *itches terrored Korea first? Koreans just went for revenge.
I know this article is like a year old and probably no one is going to read this, but here’s some extra info. March 1st is a Korean national holiday for remembering protest by a bunch of Koreans (Mostly students) in 1919, when Korea was still annexed by Japan. Because of this, around that time of the year, there is strong tension between the Koreans and the Japanese.
Not all Koreans or Japanese are like that but some minor percentage of retards on the internet start to fight over something stupid like in this case, Kim Yu-Na. They start to fight until it gets big like this…
BTW this wasn’t technically hacking… it was a DoS attack done by thousands of people running DoS programs that were distributed by the fewer percentage actual programmers
judging from the comments
i think its totally offensive and rude to laugh at a murder, even if u are racist.
and the act of finding humor in death is either demonic or racist.
and japan’s government sucks, american’s too, all governments suck! politicians….=.=*
japan is a in fact a wacky country. they have crazy things, incest, free porn, and huge diversity, and groping on trains
koreans are pretty much snobs and dont have too much manner, but then again a lot of old asians are disgusting
koreans are too…they always care about their image its annoying
i HATE stereotypes, which most of u are doing and stop being racist without a reason!
GROW UP! get off the computer and do something at least twice a week. I go to the gym 4x a week, i stay on comp for bout 2-4hrs a day
do something with ur lives-.-
READ A BOOK, not manga
So, let me get this right. 2ch has so much capacity that if it is used at once, the other customers at PIE suffer? That doesn’t make any sense.
I work for VANOC and I highly disapprove of this hacking.