The United States still has not figured out who was behind the July 4 cyberattacks that took down a series of government Web sites, National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.
After an address to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Blair also told the businessmen he is trying to patch up the relationship between Congress and the intelligence agencies. It was strained badly by a secretive Bush administration and flared up again with revelations this month that the CIA had hidden from congressional intelligence committees word of a program to develop secret hit teams to kill terrorist leaders.
The teams never were operational, according to the CIA. Agency Director Leon Panetta told the House of Representatives and Senate intelligence panels about it June 24, a day after he learned of the effort and canceled it.
The House Intelligence Committee has begun a full investigation of the program and the CIA’s history of required congressional notification.
“What I am finding in my six months in the job is that there are a lot of legacy issues that we have to work our way through as we establish a relationship with Congress,” Blair said. “I have been very clear that we will be on the side of telling them about things.”
Speaking about the cyberattacks, Blair said the attackers covered their tracks by temporarily hijacking a network of computers, which was used to spawn the cyber offensive. The United States is working with other countries to identify the perpetrators.
The South Korean government says it has evidence of North Korean involvement but has not yet assigned blame.
The attacks, in which hundreds of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in both the United States and South Korea.
Blair said the attack was relatively…