Did S. Koreans attack Japanese internet message board 2ch over figure skating?
South Korean internet users, bothered by Japanese internet bashing of Korean gold medal figure skating star Yu-Na Kim, may be behind a massive denial of service (DoS) attack that has disabled one of Japan’s most popular message boards known as 2channel, Japanese and Korean media outlets reported on March 2nd (JST).
On February 28th, the Japanese-language version of a South Korean news site, Joins.com, reported that a Korea internet site was trying to gather internet users for a joint attack aimed at taking down the parts of the 2channel (2ch.net) message boards known to be filled with ultra-nationalist Japanese rhetoric and anti-Korean sentiments. Joins.com stated that Korean internet users were upset over recent defamatory comments against their country and its citizens, particularly negative remarks made in recent weeks about figure skater Yu-Na Kim. The supposed organizers were also said to be timing the DoS attacks to coincide with the March 1st Korean national holiday, which celebrates the beginning of a movement back in 1919 for the country’s declaration of independence from Japan.
According to the company that reportedly manages the hosting of 2channel, maido3.com, their servers started receiving connection difficulties just before noon on March 1st, and a large portion of their system was knocked out of service within the following several hours. That afternoon, the company claimed that a “F5 reload attack originating from 50,000 people” was believed to be the cause. The idea was that the attackers were, on a large scale, repeatedly pushing the F5 key to reload pages on 2ch, eventually disrupting the networks system connectivity with the internet.
However, in a twist to the events, maido3.com’s servers are said to be rented and physically located at a US-based server provider named Pacific Internet Exchange. Maido3.com posted a statement from a Pacific Internet Exchange representative, which said, “The incident was caused by [a] mass amount of bot computers…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.” The US-based company also indicated that they were preparing to submit documentation about the incident to local US cyber-terrorism authorities.
2ch was inaccessible until the evening hours of March 2nd (JST). Also, some news agencies were indicating that small attempts at reprisal, likely by Japanese-based users, may have begun. The Asahi reported that internet sites relating to the disputed set of islands located between Japan and Korea, as well as the website for the Office of the Korean President were having intermediate connection difficulties from Japan.
The March 1st denial of service attacks on 2ch was not a first for the controversial message board.
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