WORLD> America
US State Department under cyberattack for 4th day
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-10 09:44

The US State Department said Thursday its website came under cyberattack for a fourth day running as it tried to prevent further attacks. "I'm just going to speak about our website, the state.gov website. There's not a high volume of attacks. But we're still concerned about it. They are continuing," State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters.

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"We are taking measures to deal with this and any potential new attacks," Kelly added.

According to computer security experts, a dozen US government websites, including those of the White House, Pentagon and State Department, were targeted in a coordinated cyberattack which also struck sites in South Korea.

South Korean lawmakers were quoted as saying Wednesday that South Korea's intelligence service believes the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) or its sympathizers may have staged the attack.

But Kelly added: "I have no information... of North Korean (DPRK) involvement. I have... nothing that I can confirm."

He said that the site based at the US embassy in Seoul, South Korea was not shut down and was not materially affected by any of these attacks.

Kelly has said the US computer emergency readiness team is working with State Department experts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other government agencies to try to resolve the problem.

DHS is leading the probe, Kelly said.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed earlier that US government and private sector websites had come under so-called "distributed denial of service" attack but declined to identify any of the targeted sites.

A denial of service attack attempts to paralyze a website by flooding it with traffic from an army of malware-infected computers known as a "botnet."