04.08.13
South of New Serbia
The Pentagon early Monday restored the U.S. Forces-Korea website, following a nearly weeklong outage.
Officials declined to say who or what prompted what they described as “a hardware failure” that crashed www.usfk.mil early last Tuesday morning …
Information security experts questioned why the site remained down for nearly seven days. George Smith, senior fellow with the think tank GlobalSecurity.org, said the length of the disruption could reflect a lack of resources or little consideration for the site, in general. He noted U.S. Forces-Korea’s Facebook page displays a photograph of a waterfall on an island where troops will be vacationing. Also, the command’s Twitter feed is outdated. “They don’t appear to care much about social media messaging. Maybe they don’t care about their website, either, really,” Smith said.
On the other hand, the Pentagon could have been taking time to investigate what went wrong, he said. “The last possibility is [a North Korean] cyberattack, which would be unsurprising, all things considered, but still childish,??? Smith said.