Epic Cyber War (Full Story): Japan V.S Korea

By Yu Kim

Published: March 1, 2010

On February 19th, a Korean international student named Kang Byung Kil in Russia was lynched and killed by Russian skinheads. Lynching Asian or other races besides whites is a very normal thing in Russia. The death of Kang Byung Kil could have been buried immediately.

However, according to Korean internet users, certain Japanese users on 2ch (www.2ch.net) which is one of the biggest community websites in Japan celebrated the act of the Russian skinheads and described Kang as a “damn Korean who deserved to die.” It was not only that Japanese users insulted Koreans in this case, but insulted Koreans further when they declared Kim Yu Na’s gold medal was earned because she bribed the judges. The Sankei newspaper in Japan claims confusion on why Asada Mao lost to Kim Yu Na. These kinds of issues obviously made Korean users clash with the Japanese on the Internet. DC Inside (www.DCInside.com) a rather big community website in Korea had a poster that was spread like forest-fire among its users. An anonymous Korean user even created a cyber cafe to organize a Korean cyber “force army” for the symbolic day of the March 1st Movement.

These kinds of things happen on the date of August 15th anually. August 15th was both the national independence of the Korean peninsula and a shameful day for the Japanese due to Emperor’s Hirohito surrender to the Allies in World War II. Korean and Japanese netizens have frequently targetted each other’s websites and other vulnerable ‘cyber targets’. Looking back at the past, the Korean netizens had a streak of losing cyber wars, according to a Korean user who participated in one of the cyber wars, the individual said that “Most of the DCInside website administrators were organized by lazy Chinese workers from the Yanbian province”.

Yet why would the Korean users ‘attack’ on the 1st of March?

The March First Movement is a significant day for the Koreans. This day was one of the earliest displays of Korean independence movements during the Japanese occupation of Korea. The name refers to an event that occurred on 1 March 1919, hence the movement’s name, literally meaning “Three-One Movement” in Korean.During the series of demonstrations that began that day in the nation, 7,000 civilians were killed by Japanese police and soldiers.

As the primary result of spreading the news and collecting interested surfers and netizens, the Korean side successfully gathered up to 10,000 users for their “war” on Japan.  But of course there was that minority of users who commented on the topic of a cyber war, “Who cares about nationalities, all of you are jerks anyway.”

1:00 PM-

The war finally starts: Korean users divide into two groups, each group spread by 2 sides to post unlimited messages on the 2ch board while attacking the server by pressing f5 and other key buttons. DDOS (Distributed denial of services) attacks also were used to have the Japanese server run amok.

1:43 PM-

Japanese users from Yahoo! Japan considered to spread a computer virus on the Korean users.

1:44 PM-

All the board servers in 2ch were downed by the attacks from the South Korean users.

2:13 PM-

 

 

 

 

2:50 PM-

Most of the Japanese users in 2ch were organized by a high school student and so the student waited for “reinforcements” until 5:00 P.M when they decided to attack DCInside.

However they were thwarted by the DCInside administrator’s total protection that was contributed by the Korean users.

3:35PM-

Even if 2ch administrators blocked the IP addresses from Korea, the server could not revive, and the Japanese users tried to raise up alternating site addresses which the Koreans caught immediately and wreaked damage on them until the destruction of 2ch was repeated over and over.

5:13 PM-

A few Korean users from Humor University, Starcraft gallery in DCInside attacked the comedy program gallery board forum as an attempt to distract the Korean users on the “war front” as they did not want their rivals to take the hegemony in the future. However most of the other Koreans kept the attacks on 2ch even though there was such an internal conflict.

6:00 PM -

A Korean ”spy” found out that one of the Japanese users had set up a plan to attack a meaningful site to Korean.  He detected Japanese attacks were pointing towards the Korean presidential website.

However, none of the Korean users didn’t really care about the attack on the Presidential website, because the current President of South Korea, Lee Myung Bak is very unpopular to Korean netizens and a few of them had wanted to collaborate with the Japanese to attack the Korean presidential website, and most of the Korean users laughed at this because they considered President Lee to be too pro-Japanese added with his background of being born in Osaka, Japan which doesn’t make sense for a Korean President…

One Korean user joked that “finally…our President actually helped us this time by spreading out the Japanese users, truly he did his job this time as our President.”

6:11 PM -

The Japanese next targeted the VANK (Voluntary Agency Network Of Korea) website that provides accurate information about Korea to international textbook publishing companies and other publishers. Few Koreans expected the Japanese would attack a non-related site for this particular cyber war and thus reeled from the shock. VANK has shut down their website for more than 1 hour.

6:38 PM -

The forum board of the comedy program gallery which led this “war” was down for 4 minutes due to attacks by 2ch users. It was revived in a few seconds after.

7:00 PM-

There was a slugfest between the two belligerents, so many Korean users decided to put full effort into force and effort to attack 2ch at 8:00 P.M.

8:43PM-

Spokesman of 2ch urged to stop the attack on the Japanese side.

Direct Translation: "I know there are some guys' who want to keep attacking, but since our command is totally lost, we should stop for now to attack them later when arrangements are made."

9:35 PM-

2ch was shut down for nearly 8 hours, and MBC, one of the major news channels in Korea, reported about this epic cyber war on their news time.

9:41 PM-

There were several opinions from the Korean side such as “That’s enough, we’ve shut down the Japanese website for more than 9 hours”, yet a more aggressive group insisted to “fight until that website goes down to hell.” These kinds of events naturally goes down to the individual level and is up to the people themselves who participated whether to go on or not. As of this moment, only half of the 2ch servers are “revived”, yet the entire website is still shut down at this time of the publishing of this article.

This event gave us much knowledge, some sarcastic and some serious.

Defense is very important for war, obviously in such an enviroment where manuverability is limitless it is even more important which means as technology progresses there are always those who might abuse it and such measures should be taken in that case in any given situation.

Information is power, according to Sun Tzu knowing all information regarding war is benefitial to your steps toward “victory” and it is evidently true from observing this timeline of events.

One can, without much thought, predict even further hostilities between the two Asian nations as both progresses more into the 21st century over their history and cultural differences.

However, it is a relief to see that this dispute was “solved” by mental or ’cyber war’ which is much more better than actual wars involving guns and soldiers. Some awe mixes into this as both sides clearly showed such understanding with today’s available technology. I hope that there will be a chance in the future to better communications between the Korean and the Japanese, but that future day seems to be very far off just by looking at a “war” in the limitless space of the Internet.

- Yu Kim

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