posted on July 1, 2002 08:35:25 AM
Well, not really RIP, but I have decided to give up on the internet. Those Korean smut peddlars have won ... I am no longer interested in playing their automatic pop-up SPAM porn game that seems to interrupt just about everything I try to do these days. I have tried the pop-up killers, the spyware and all that other stuff to no avail.
So, to you slant-eyed little geeks ... when George W. decides to bomb the cr@p out of Korea, I'm with him all the way.
posted on July 2, 2002 09:53:15 AM
Ha ha ... I can still post from my work PC (during breaks only ... honest Boss). There must be some kind of firewall installed on this network - the geeks can't find me here!
Check this out:
Foreigners Make Angry Protests Against Korean Spam Mails
By Kim Deok-hyun
A growing number of foreign Internet users complain about Korean-language ``spam'' although the government has taken steps to block outbound unsolicited advertising e-mail.
An anti-spam civic organization in the United States has asked the government-run Korea Information Security Agency (KISA) for an immediate investigation of 26 Korean websites, which have been exploited as international ``routing paths'' for the junk mail.
Calling for get-tough measures against unsolicited e-mail advertising from the websites, the organization sent a message saying it would blacklist the Korean websites as spammers.
Fifteen educational institutions, two public agencies and nine private companies were listed in the warning message, a government official said.
More recently, Tonic Corp., a ``.to'' top level domain registrar in the U.S., has blocked access of Korean ``wo.to'' Internet addresses after a series of reports that the addresses were relaying unsolicited Korean- language e-mail ads, an official at the KISA said.
The recent controversy illustrates an alarming level of ignorance about Internet etiquette among domestic online marketers.
Bureaucrats are also frustrated over their inability to crack down on spammers over the past few months.
While the actual extent of the damage is unknown, it is believed to be affecting hundreds of thousands of Internet users.
`` About 90 percent of my spam mails comes from Korea. The rest are evenly divided between Taiwan, the U.S. and Germany. I have blocked more than 250 senders, which just go directly into the wastebasket. But still they come and they still take time to download from the server,'' wrote a German at a news group titled ``How do I stop Korean spamming?'' on the Internet.
Unfortunately, many Internet reports suggest that the Korean-language spam is tarnishing the reputation of the country's image.
The government has been proactive in boosting its national image externally as an information-technology powerhouse, but foreign Internet users say Korea has a long way to go to learn civil e-manners and awareness about the downsides of the Information age.
Hacking incidents are also fueling the concerns. According to the KISA, a total of 5,333 computer networks were reported to suffer from damage due to hacking in 2001, up 174 percent from a year ago.
Of the 1,157 cases, where the route of hacking was identified, nearly half, or 408 cases, were caused by foreign hackers, with most of the country's online population knowing little about computer security.
In particular, 3,664 cases, 69 percent of total reported hacking incidents, were cases of scanning. Scanning is, experts say, a form of intelligence gathering for a hacker. In the foot-printing phase, the attacker creates a profile of the target organization, with information about the victim such as its domain name system (DNS), e-mail servers, and its IP address range.
In the scanning phase, the attacker finds information about the specific IP addresses that can be accessed over the Internet, their operating systems, the system architecture, and the services running on each computer.
So, the scanning can be considered as the preparatory step for hacking, because the attacker is searching for vulnerabilities of a target computer network before committing an intrusion.
``After the scanning, virulent computer codes remain in the system,'' said a KISA official. ``The problem is most system administrators in the country have no awareness of how to clean the virulent codes without prompting another scanning.''
The government routinely works with private companies to issue warnings about new hacking attacks, but never before have they made such a high- profile stand.
In a study by the U.S. online security firm Riptech, Korea was ranked second place in terms of hacking incidents and cyber attacks, after the United States.
Experts said it is urgent to improve netizens' awareness of Internet etiquette and computer security.
``With the explosive growth in the Internet environment and users, most of the country's online population know little about the dark side of the Internet,'' according to Cha Yang-shin, a senior official at the Ministry of Information and Communication.
He emphasized that the guardianship of the Internet requires a partnership with the government, private companies and the public as a whole.
