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Who or what caused a takedown of computer systems at banks and broadcasters in South Korea on Wednesday is still a matter of speculation, but suspicion immediately and unsurprisingly fell on Seoul's archenemy to the north.

If true, it wouldn't be the first time that North Korea, often regarded as technologically backward, has successfully wielded the computer as weapon.

Computer antivirus maker McAfee says Pyongyang was behind two major denial of service (DDos) attacks in recent years — one in 2011 that was directed at South Korean government and banking websites, and another in 2009 that brought down U.S. government Internet sites. Pyongyang has denied involvement in either attack.

(And, as recently as last week, North Korea has also blamed the South for similar attacks.)

"It's got to be a hacking attack," Lim Jong-in, dean of Korea University's Graduate School of Information Security, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying of Wednesday's computer problems. "Such simultaneous shutdowns cannot be caused by technical glitches."

As AsianCorrespondent.com points out, Pyongyang has become something of a cyber-scapegoat in South Korea, leading to skepticism when companies point fingers northward for tech troubles. Even so, on Wednesday, the problems were "so wide-ranging ... that many feel, and fear, that the North is upping their game in the peninsula's cyberwar."

It might also seem a little too coincidental that Pyongyang threatened last year to attack several companies, including two that were hit by computer outages — broadcasters KBS and MBC.

Wednesday's attack, if indeed it was one, looks more sophisticated than a DDos attack, which as we've reported in the past, can be relatively simple to pull off.

An unnamed official from the state-run Korea Communications Commission, South Korea's telecom regulator, told the AP that in Wednesday's alleged attack, investigators speculate malicious code was spread from company servers that send automatic updates of security software and virus patches.

Korean broadcasters KBS and MBC said their computers went down at 2 p.m. "[and] ... were still down about seven hours after the shutdown began," the Associated Press reported, citing the Korea Communications Commission.

KBS employees said they watched helplessly as files stored on their computers began disappearing. According to the AP:

"Orchestrating the mass shutdown of the networks of major companies would have taken at least one to six months of planning and coordination, said Kwon Seok-chul, chief executive officer of Seoul-based cybersecurity firm Cuvepia Inc.

"Kwon, who analyzed personal computers at one of the three broadcasters shut down Wednesday, said he hasn't yet seen signs that the malware was distributed by North Korea.

" 'But hackers left indications in computer files that mean this could be the first of many attacks,' he said.

"Lim [Jong-in] said tracking the source of the outage would take months."

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has formally apologized for the forced adoptions that took place in the country from the late-1950s to the 1970s. The BBC reports:

"Tens of thousands of babies of unmarried, mostly teenage mothers, were thought to have been taken by the state and given to childless married couples.

"Many women said they were coerced into signing away their children."

The future doesn't look so bright for China-based Suntech, one of the world's largest makers of solar panels: on Wednesday it was forced into bankruptcy after missing a $541 million payment to bondholders.

Suntech Power Holdings, based in Wuxi on the outskirts of Shanghai, is largely a victim of its own success, borrowing heavily for expansion in recent years (as did Chinese competitors Trina Solar and Yingli Green Energy). Although worldwide demand for solar panels is high, the ramp up in production created "enormous oversupply and a ferocious price war," according to a New York Times article in October.

(Solyndra, the U.S. solar panel maker that received government loan guarantees and subsequently went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, has sued Suntech, Trina and Yingli, claiming the Chinese trio of companies conspired to drive it out of business)

From 2009 to 2011, Suntech more than doubled its annual production capacity to 2,400 megawatts, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

It notes that Suntech got its start in 2002 under founder Shi Zhengrong, who was ousted earlier this month as the company sought aid from regional authorities in Wuxi.

Shi "took the company public three years later, becoming the world's first solar billionaire. He obtained credit from the China Development Bank Corp. to wrest control of the industry from German and Japanese competitors," Bloomberg says.

While U.S. and European solar companies have been forced into restructuring, Beijing has continued to support its own solar industries until December, when China's State Council signaled it would stop funding money-losing companies, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

A new book from prominent primatologist Jane Goodall "contains borrowed passages without attribution," according to a report in The Washington Post. The book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants, is due out next month and was co-authored by Gail Hudson, who worked on two of Goodall's previous books.. The Post alleges that the "borrowings ... range from phrases to an entire paragraph from Web sites such as Wikipedia and others that focus on astrology, tobacco, beer, nature and organic tea." Goodall did not contest the allegations, telling the Post in an email that she was "distressed to discover that some of the excellent and valuable sources were not properly cited, and I want to express my sincere apologies." Seeds of Hope publisher Grand Central expressed surprise, telling the Post: "We have not formulated a detailed plan beyond crediting the sources in subsequent releases."

Photography magazine Fotopedia has published a stunning photo essay of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare & Company, the haunt of writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is coming out with a book, according to a press release Tuesday from Henry Holt, her publisher. It says Rice's book will focus on "the never-ending process of building democracy as citizens — and their governments — strive to attain and secure the ideals of self-rule."

Edward Jay Epstein writes in The New York Review of Books about taking a class with Vladimir Nabokov (paywall protected): "He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor's note."

Poet T.R. Hummer on Walt Whitman: "The poetry is so vast, so manifold — and exists in so many revised forms — that Whitman is the American poet most like the fabled elephant as described by blind witnesses, each touching a different part of the creature thinking it to be a wall or a snake."

Google's Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen write about the computer worm that attacked Iranian nuclear facilities in a passage from their forthcoming book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business: "When we asked the former Israeli intelligence chief Meir Dagan about [Stuxnet], his only comment was, 'Do you really expect me to tell you?' "