Fergie's Tech Blog

Cyber Attacks Traced to the U.S., Britain

Kim Zetter writes on Threat Level:

International fingerpointing in the recent cyberattacks against U.S. and South Korean web sites has widened to include the UK, as researchers examining the attacks trace them to a server in the United Kingdom.

But the UK company that owns the server says it, in turn, traced the attacks to a VPN connection originating in Miami, Florida.

With hawks in Congress and the press urging President Obama to launch an all-out cyber war in retaliation for the website outages, things are looking bad for the Sunshine State. Though it should be noted that the Miami connection was likely just another proxy used by the hacker, who could be based in the U.S. or anywhere else.

Researchers at Bkis Security in Hanoi, who reported findings about the UK server on their company’s blog, say that the denial-of-service attacks that struck more than three dozen government and commercial sites last week were launched from more than 166,000 computers in 74 countries controlled by a server in the UK. The IP range for the server is 195.90.118.xxx, which is registered to Global Digital Broadcast, which streams digital TV content from Latin America to consumers.

A company representative was unavailable for comment.

posted by Fergie @ 7/14/2009 01:41:00 PM