U.S. Government Web Sites Downed By North Korea?

As reported by Author: Michael Horton of TechFragments

If you had tried accessing many of the U.S. government web sites since July 4th, you were probably presented with a page that said cannot find server or unable to load web site. This is the result of a targeted DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Transportation Department and Federal Trade Commission web sites. The attack apparently is coming from North Korea according to South Korea intel.

The attacks on the web sites began on July 4th and seems to have continued during this week, leaving one web site still down.

Officials in the U.S. have not been discussing the details of the cyber attack but South Korea's National Intelligence service said that the attacks were believed to be from North Korea which actually isn't far-fetched at all since they launched multiple missiles in defiance of the U.S. on July 4th.

The department of Homeland Security has issued notices to federal departments and is advising them on how to take steps to mitigate the attacks. Typically with these type of attacks you must block them from the upstream providers so that they never reach the web sites. The major problem with this is that the pipelines leading to the web site will still be saturated allowing hardly anyone through, if at all.

United States Border Firewall System
I am a believer in creating a national firewall system that's passive, in the means of no traffic is "inspected" or logged but in the event of such attacks like this and others - it can be filtered out before coming into the United States. I am by no means a security guru nor do I pretend to understand how the pipelines come into the U.S. but I could see such a system working if it were at all possible.

It would have to consist of many firewalls across different providers and would only affect traffic coming INTO the U.S. from overseas. Envisioning something and then actually proceeding with carrying out that envision are two totally different things. For those of you that are experts in this field, would anything remotely be possible like this? Could we ultimately have a "border firewall" that protects our infrastructure and networks from outside attacks like this?