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South Korea fights DDoS attacks with digital 'bunkers'

Government has installed digital "bunkers" to prevent a repeat of the massive distributed denial-of-service attacks that crippled parts of the country last year.

Darren Pauli
Cho's rough sketch of the DDoS bunkers, drawn at the APT conference. Credit:Darren Pauli/ZDNet Australia

South Korea has installed digital "bunkers" to prevent a repeat of the massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that crippled parts of the country last year.

The nation was floored after huge streams of junk Internet data poured across its networks last year, targeting the infrastructure of government and businesses. "We were caught off-guard," Jinhyun Cho of the Korea Computer Emergency Response Team (KrCERT) told ZDNet Australia. "The whole country knows what a DDoS attack is."

A "bunker" in this case is a new IP address served to a business that is under persistent DDoS attack but lacks the funds or resources to protect itself. Traffic from the DDoS attack continues to hit the original IP address while the business remains in operation under a new address.

South Korea is continuously under DDoS attack, Cho said, and the bunkers are hoped to help mitigate part of the problem.

Read more of "Korea attacks force DDoS bunker creation" at ZDNet Australia.