Google News points to 1400+ of 1500 July 4th Outage stories blaming the North as having planned and orchestrated the attack. Why?  There’s no smoking gun…yet, if at all.

Tracing the history of this story, despite the lack of much technical grounding, an echo chamber seems to have emerged:

• The American media is blaming Pyongyang, (which seems to make sense in light of recent nuclear test, ICBM launches, etc.)…
• …largely because the Korean media is blaming Pyongyang…
• …which is in turn doing so because Korean politicians are going on record blaming the North…
• …citing the Korean military and intelligence services, which have been leaking the news.

An oft-cited Yonhap piece sums it up nicely, while hopefully raising some analytical red flags:

North Korea appears to have orchestrated the recent cyber attack that disrupted dozens of South Korean Web sites, including that of the presidential office, parliamentary sources said Wednesday, citing informal reports by the top spy agency. (My emphasis.)

Why the skepticism?  Perhaps it’s because in a previous life I spent 8 years working on East Asia, and this kind of hype seems all too typical of the Korean media, and of the occasionally paranoid, hawkish Lee Myung-bak administration in South Korea.

There’s something to the fact that the South Koreans blamed the North a little too quickly after the first round of attacks. Remember, unraveling who’s behind a DDoS attack is a tedious and slow process, and if the success of the attack are any judge, the South is less-than-perfectly equipped to do lightning-fast attribution.

Clearly, I’m not suggesting that the North had nothing to do with it, or (more likely), that those who actually staged the attack didn’t have the DPRK’s best interests in mind.  But the policy takeaway here is to apply a little common sense. A cyberattack is not an ICBM; you can’t track its set-up for days before launch, then record the telemetry as it rises from a discrete geographic location.  Tracking down its origins take time.  Generally, a lot more time than the South took in blaming the North.