Why North Korea Might Not Be Behind 4 July Cyber Attacks

I’ve been waiting for this. Jeff Carr provides his assessment of why DPRK might not be the driving force behind the recent DDoS attacks on US and South Korea. In an email exchange between myself and a Reuters journalist I expressed similar (unpublished) caution about attributing blame to the Dear Leader but Jeff puts flesh on the bones of this suspicion:

… this rather smallish botnet which was amateurishly crafted would not have passed muster at any of the official IT research facilities associated with the DPRK. These are well-educated individuals, some having attended the Indian Institute of Technology (one of the world’s top technology schools) and the quality of their work is high.

That leaves the most likely candidate to be a non-state Korean hacker living in China or Japan who saw an opportunity to embarrass the U.S. and South Korea and took it.

Click through to read the full analysis.