International network attacks traced back to UK

2009-07-15

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that hit the US and South Korea earlier this month have been traced back to a source in the UK.

Nguyen Minh Duc, senior director at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security (Bkis), has analysed the data breaches that hit the US and South Korea at the start of the week.

In a post on the company's blog, Mr Duc points out that the master server which controls all of the servers used in the attack originated in the UK.

Computer zombies were found to select one of the eight connected servers every three minutes to receive orders, with the IP address of the main server found to originate in the UK, running on a Windows 2003 Server Operating System.

The zombie attacks are thought to have extended to 74 countries, with South Korea and the US attracting the bulk of the IT intrusions.

This revelation follows an investigation by More4 News, which found that NHS computers in the UK had been exposed to more than 8,000 dangerous viruses over the last year.

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