国外媒体:韩国政府网站遭受黑客攻击（在线收听）

韩国总统府、国防部、外交通商部等政府部门和主要银行、媒体网站7日晚同时遭分布式拒绝服务(DDoS)攻击，瘫痪时间长达4小时。

大部分在7日晚遭到黑客攻击的网站8日都已恢复正常，不过也有部分网站到8日晚仍然不稳定或不能正常链接。

一名调查人员表示，由于DDoS攻击是由多台计算机同时进行的，而且通常黑客绕经很多国家进行攻击，因此要追踪并终止此类攻击较为困难。

韩国国家情报院官员称，怀疑此次黑客攻击事件幕后可能有朝鲜或支持朝鲜的力量。

South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted parliamentary intelligence committee lawmakers as saying North Korea may be behind the apparent cyber attack.

Wednesday marks the 15th anniversary of the death of the North's revered first leader, Kim Il Sung. In past years, North Korea has used the occasion to show defiance or superiority toward the South.

South Korean authorities began to notice the Internet disruption Tuesday evening. By Wednesday, Korea Communication Commission official Lee Myung-su said the attack program had spread far and wide.

He says 18,000 personal computers have been infected by a malicious code.

At least 11 South Korean government sites have been either greatly slowed or made unavailable, including the sites for the presidential Blue House, the Defense Ministry, and the lawmaking National Assembly. Several major South Korean banks and the leading Internet portal, Naver, were also affected.

U.S. sites have also been affected, including the Treasury Department, Secret Service, and Federal Trade Commission. The Web site of Voice of America news has been unavailable in South Korea for two days.

Computer experts describe this kind of attack as a "distributed denial of service." A computer virus spreads from one personal computer to another, directing data traffic from those computers to the targeted Web sites.

Shin Hwa-su, of the Korea Information Security Agency in Seoul, says the increased traffic overloads the target sites.

He says it is like 16-lanes worth of vehicles onto a four-lane highway. The road gets completely jammed and there is no movement.

Shin explains that any ordinary computer can turn into what programmers call a "zombie PC," if it does not have the proper software to protect it from viral attacks.

Kim Jae-gyu, chief of South Korea's Police Cyber Terror Center says a special task force has been formed to investigate the attack.

He says police have seized one computer that was sending out the malicious software, and have confirmed the program has targeted a total of 25 Web sites.

So far, South Korean authorities say the attack has been more of an inconvenience than a genuine security threat. They say no sensitive data appears to have been extracted from the targeted sites.

South Korea is one of the most wired nations in the world. Major governmental agencies like the Ministry of Defense find themselves under attack by hackers thousands of times on any given day. Parliamentary hearings on this particular round of attacks are scheduled for Thursday.