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This week, optimists had no trouble finding fresh evidence to suggest that the housing market is recovering.

On Thursday, they learned from a Realtors' report that existing home sales hit the highest level in more than 3 years. And earlier this week, a Commerce Department report showed homebuilding permits have been rising at the quickest pace since June 2008.

But not everyone is convinced that the sector's momentum has staying power. Skeptics point to reasons why the housing sector might falter, just as it has several times over the past six years.

If the optimists and pessimists had to face off in front of a judge, these are the exhibits they might enter as evidence:

The Optimists' Case

Your honor, don't be blinded by years of bad news. Look at these recent statistics:

— Home prices rose by more than 7 percent last year, according to the widely respected S&P/Case-Shiller Index.

— Builders have been hiring again, adding workers at a pace of 30,000 a month over the past five months.

— The Federal Reserve plans to hold interest rates at historically low levels for a long time, making homes more affordable.

— The number of underwater borrowers, i.e., those whose mortgages exceed the value of their homes, fell by almost 4 million last year to 7 million, according to JPMorgan Securities.

Economy

For Some Ready To Buy, A Good Home Is Hard To Find

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.