North Korea’s Internet Outage Was Likely the Work of Hacktivists (The Washington Post)

“If the government wanted to do something about this, I would suspect they would do something more targeted toward the leadership rather than just shutting down the network,” said Eugene Spafford, a professor of information security at Purdue University. “Teenagers with botnets regularly shut down networks.”

Targeting the financial assets of North Korean leaders (rather than the country’s Internet equipment) would be much more closely aligned with President Obama’s warning of a “proportional response” — and something the White House could accomplish that nameless hacktivists probably couldn’t on their own, Spafford added.

Cybersecurity Seen as DoD Priority Under Carter

Though not schooled in IT and IT security, cyber is an area of interest for Carter in which he has been involved in for many years. “He knows enough about [cyber] that he likely knows when he should call on domain experts for more information, something not all of our national leaders have done,” says Gene Spafford, founder and executive director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University.