A malicious code embedded in personal computers to attack Internet sites in Korea began to destroy hard drives of their host computers on Sunday, communication authorities said.Key government agencies and financial institutions suffered cyber assaults Friday and Saturday with minor damage caused.
On Sunday, the code for the so-called “distributed denial-of-service” attacks activated an order to delete all data in personal computers in which the virus was planted, the Korea Communications Commission said.
A DDoS attack uses “zombie’ computers to launch simultaneous access to selected sites and swamp them with traffic.
The code also activated programs to block those computers from downloading vaccine programs to treat the virus, it said.
The destruction of host computers usually starts four to seven days after the computers are embedded with the DDos code. But this time, it began only two days after the infection, the KCC said.
