Korea: January 25, 2003

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An internet worm, apparently released in South Korea, caused many home and business users to temporarily lose their internet service. Although the "Slammer" worm only infected about 200 of the 50,000 vulnerable (MS SQL) servers in the country, the worm transmitted so many attempts to detect and infect other servers that legitimate traffic was often crowded out. South Korea is the heaviest user of the internet in Asia, and has the highest proportion of high speed home internet users in the world. But people were up in arms over this event, which revealed sloppy security practices, and the fact that a disproportionate amount of the world's hacking activity comes from South Korean internet users.