North Korea Launches a Cyber War Against The United States And South Korea?

North Korea is suspected to be behind a cyber attack that started on July 4th against the United States and South Korea that met with limited success (http://tech.yahoo.com/news/nm/20090708/wr_nm/us_korea_south_internet).

It would not be the first State vs State cyber war, but as far as I can tell it would be the first launched by North Korea against the United States. When Russia invaded Georgia (Berman Post: Russia Invades Georgia) the physical attack was in conjunction with a cyber assault. As I said in Berman Post: Google: A Virtual Superpower:

"The conflict saw a few historic firsts. The war was the first in history to see a physical attack coincide with a virtual assault. As the Russians were bombing Georgia a massive Denial of Service (DOS) attack was launched from Russian territory. Put simply, a DOS attack is essentially an attempt to overload a website. A website can only handle so much traffic at one time. A DOS attack sends more traffic to a website than it can handle, effectively knocking it off line or slowing it down to the point that it becomes useless to legitimate attempts at accessing the webpage until the attack stops. The DOS attack was launched against the Georgian government’s webpage and was successful. It was also the first time that web defense experts were sent as aid from one country to another at war.

DOS attacks, like many other web-based attacks, are almost impossible to trace back to a source—not the source of the attack, but the influence behind it. Launching a DOS attack is fairly easy. All you have to do is constantly refresh a webpage to flood it with traffic. For the attack to work, you need many computers acting at the same time. The question of who launched the attack comes down to a choice between the government, the people, or a business organization (which would likely have been paid off). The answer is most likely a combination"

Russia and China are suspected of launching attacks against other countries in the past.