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Seoul market feels worm attack
SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korea, the world's most wired country, counted the cost Monday of a weekend of Internet chaos caused by a computer worm. Seoul's benchmark Kospi stock index fell more than three percent in early trade and by midday was at 590.32, down 19.11 points or a decline of 3.14 percent. Market heavyweight Samsung Electronics was down 4.15 percent at 300,000 won, while shares in the country's two largest Internet service providers, KT Corp and Hanaro Telecom fell sharply. Web security firms Ahnlab and Hauri jumped by the daily limit high of 12 percent. Almost all KT customers lost their connections during the attack, which began about 2 pm Saturday. Some 70 percent of South Korea's 48 million people have Internet access and half of these subscribe to KT. The weekend worm, dubbed "SQL Slammer", affected companies across the world after it shut Web servers and slowed down the Internet. The country's Minister of Information and Communication, Lee Sang-chul, said Sunday that the worm shut down the main servers of Internet service providers such as KT, Hanaro Telecom, Thrunet, and Dreamline. The servers were back up by 11 pm Saturday. President's warning"It is a serious problem that people's life has been disrupted," President Kim Dae-jung said in a statement, adding that he had instructed related ministries to take steps to prevent further virus attacks. South Korea has the world's highest Internet penetration rate and online stock trading normally accounts for half of total market turnover. On Monday, stock trading was reportedly unaffected by the worm -- but volume was halved. "All systems are running okay. We don't use the public Internet. We use a specially leased line, so we were not affected by the attack," a spokesman for the Korea Stock Exchange told Reuters. The worm, which spread through network connections rather than email as many viruses do, exploited a weakness in Microsoft Corp's Windows 2000 SQL server database software, although did not delete or otherwise touch data. Crashed serversBut it crashed servers and congested traffic on the global network for a few hours, slowing downloads by as much as 50 percent. The impact of an attack could have been far more serious if it had been a working day. "We are receiving damage reports from companies and commercial PC operators, but cannot tally the damage in money term right now," said a spokesman at South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication. Industry experts said the damage was not likely to be financially significant as it occurred at the weekend and no physical damage was inflicted on computers and servers. Microsoft chief security strategist Scott Charney on Saturday urged companies, the main buyers of Microsoft's SQL Server 2000 and other related programs, to download security patches. "It was a vulnerability. We knew about it, but someone is exploiting it," Charney told Reuters. "We want our customers to be as secure as possible and install the patches." Reuters contributed to this report.
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