S. Korea's spy agency lowers cyber threat alert level

By Tony Chang
SEOUL, July 13 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's spy agency said Monday it has lowered
the country's threat level against online attacks after traffic flows on key
government and private Web sites returned to normal after recent attacks by
hackers.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said the threat level was lowered from
"caution" to "watch" effective 7 p.m. Sunday.
Since Tuesday, Web sites operated by the government, banks and Internet portals
in South Korea and the United States have reported access delays and failures due
to massive so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
The NIS, however, said it was closely monitoring the possibility of more threats,
concerned that attacks may resume with the beginning of the work week.
Hackers allegedly initiated the DDoS attacks by infiltrating a network of
"zombie" computers which then flooded specific Web servers. The sudden increase
in traffic can significantly increase the time it takes for a site to load pages
for legitimate users, or crash completely.
odissy@yna.co.kr
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