Last Monday, a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root" servers that provide the primary road map for the Internet. A subsequent and possibly related attack targeted the "name" servers that house Internet domains like dot-com and dot-info.
East Asia is a major source of cyber crime and computer attacks, in part because of the relatively high number of broadband users in the region's countries. High-speed Internet service is essential to DDOS attacks, in which hackers use dozens -- and often hundreds -- of commandeered computers to overwhelm targeted networks with a flood of Internet traffic. South Korea boasts nearly as many broadband users (8 million) as the U.S. and has more broadband connections per capita than any other country.
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