Korean, Japanese Netizens Wage ‘Cyber War’

Netizens in Korea and Japan yesterday waged a war online by rapidly raising Web traffic and disturbing each other’s servers.

At 1 p.m., a posting uploaded on Korea’s social networking Web site DC Inside urged users to attack Japan’s famous Web site 2ch. Around two minutes later, both of the sites began posting the message, “Access difficult due to too much traffic.”

Korean Web users claim the war was started by their Japanese counterparts, saying they attacked a Japanese site on the Independence Movement Day since Japanese netizens expressed joy over the killing of a Korean student in Russia.

The Japanese netizens are also known to have said Kim Yu-na won the Olympic gold medal in figure skating because she bribed the judges.

Korean netizens decided to paralyze the server of the Japanese site by continuously clicking the “refresh” button and posting, “Dokdo belongs to Korea.” They even put programs used for DDoS attack on the site.

Twelve thousand Korean netizens gathered at 1 p.m., sending traffic to the main and internal news pages of 2ch as well as its bulletin board. After certain users said 2ch’s Web master blocked Korean IP addresses from accessing the site, Korean netizens resumed their attack by accessing the site via Google’s translation Web site.

Within 20 minutes, more than half of 2ch server went down but soon revived. After the message “Let’s reduce the Web site to ashes” appeared on DC Inside, Korean netizens used stronger measures to paralyze 2ch in less than an hour.

A Korean user who took part in the attack said, “It was just fair punishment for the Japanese netizens’ behavior of belittling Korea.” Other Korean netizens said they consider their attack a way to realize “cyber nationalism” and an act of patriotism.

But a manager at Korea Internet and Security Agency, Shin Dae-gyu, said, “Intentionally sending traffic to a Web site is no different from a DDoS attack.”

According to the law on telecom networks and information protection in Korea, intentionally disturbing the operation of or attacking a Web site is a crime.

Jeon Sang-jin, a sociology professor at Sogang University in Seoul, said, “It is a serious problem that attacking others online is considered conscionable behavior.”

bsism@donga.com