Wednesday, July 08, 2009

North Korean Cyberattack Topples Numerous Sites

Quick note which I would have sent to you earlier--except that I couldn't get through to Blogger.

In case some of you didn't notice, portions of the Internet were a disaster today through roughly 1:30 PM EDT by my reckoning. Specifically, I myself had a hell of a time accessing any kind of software that provided stock market quotes. And my Internet broker was absolutely unavailable from about 10:30 AM EDT until roughly 1:30 PM.

The likely cause: an ongoing cyberattack, more than likely from our close friends in North Korea and/or their fellow travelers in South Korea. A massive, bot-driven attack, the network carnage started--surprise--on the 4th of July holiday weekend in South Korea, overwhelming several South Korean government sites and eventually attacking over here, including the Pentagon, the White House, NSA, and, surprise, Homeland Security, portions of whose site were disabled as late as this afternoon. (I checked.) They also went after banks and the NYSE with varying degrees of success.

My friends on the left will say, oh, you have no proof. The hell I don't. According to numerous government sources, this ain't the first time these 5-star agressors have done this stuff. And just because you don't have an immediate smoking gun is no reason not to gear up to go after these criminals in some way, shape, or form.

But to be honest, the worst perps in this were the increasingly disgusting and uselesss MSM. I only became aware of this ongoing, rolling attack this morning when, after being unable to trade not long after the market open, I lost several thousand dollars because I couldn't hedge a few of my positions. If I'd known what was going on, I might not have put on the positions to begin with.

But the MSM, enmeshed in wall-to-wall suckup coverage of Michael Jackson (ratings, anyone?) never bothered to tell me or anyone else what had already been discovered in some quarters. And it took me quite a few web searches this morning to track down the likely difficulty.

The press loves to extol its virtues as our savior and protector against the Predators who run the Republican Party. But if they'd been doing our job, most of us would have known about this major cyberattack as early as Friday night or Saturday morning of last week--and we might have been able to act accordingly.

But no. The MSM--which of course, de facto, is better than you and me--spent nearly the entire weekend of valuable airtime with nonstop coverage of someone who, for all his obvious talent and weirdness--will never hold a candle to the heart surgeon in your local hospital.

Furthermore, aside from an anonymous dispatch or two from AP--never seemingly picked up by anyone--we all remained in the dark as our government sustained a massive cyberattack which today moved to damage the already damaged retirement portfolios of folks like you and me.

Small wonder these clowns are on their way out. They've turned into reliable media shills who trumpet the latest crap from New York and Hollywood. That's why the rest of us have to rely on the web and the blogosphere for our information. When the Dear Leader isn't taking it down, anyway.

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