Broken Toys

As always, Korea is somewhere off in the future, being all Blade Runnery.

Despite the barrage of inquiries, the troubled sites are keeping mum until then. Only Item Ria, which experienced connection problems, posted a notice on its site explaining the reason behind the shut-down. “We were under pressure from hackers, and a temporary shut-down for maintenance was necessary to scale up our security,” it said.

An Internet security expert said they got an inquiry demanding to know why so many Chinese users are logging on to the trading sites. He suspects it is highly likely that hackers have broken into the sites. Whereas in the past hackers simply took money from Internet users by tracing down their IDs and passwords, now they reached the point of threatening the sites themselves.