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ROK blames DPRK sabotage for cyber attacks
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-09 07:46
SEOUL: Republic of Korea (ROK) intelligence officials believe the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) or pro-Pyongyang forces in the ROK committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major ROK and US websites, lawmaker's aide said yesterday. The sites of 11 ROK organizations including the presidential Blue House and the Defense Ministry went down or had access problems since late Tuesday, according to the state-run Korea Information Security Agency. Agency spokeswoman Ahn Jeong-eun said 11 US sites suffered similar problems. Yesterday, the National Intelligence Service told a group of ROK lawmakers it believes that the DPRK or DPRK sympathizers in the ROK "were behind" the attacks, according to an aide to one of the lawmakers briefed. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity citing the sensitivity of the information. He refused to allow the name of the lawmaker he works for to be published. The National Intelligence Service - the ROK's main spy agency - said it couldn't immediately confirm the report. Earlier yesterday, the agency said that 12,000 computers in the ROK and 8,000 computers overseas had been infected and used for the cyber attack. The agency said it believed the attack was "thoroughly" prepared and committed by hackers "at the level of a certain organization or state." It said it was cooperating with the American investigative authorities to examine the case. The ROK's Yonhap news agency said military intelligence officers were looking at the possibility that the attack may have been committed by DPRK hackers and pro-DPRK forces in the ROK. The ROK's Defense Ministry said it could not confirm the report. The ROK media reported in May that the DPRK was running a cyber warfare unit that tries to hack into US and ROK military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service. An initial investigation in the ROK found that many personal computers were infected with a virus program ordering them to visit major official websites in the ROK and the US at the same time, Korean information agency official Shin Hwa-su said. There has been no immediate reports of similar cyber attack in other Asian countries. In the US, the Treasury Department, Secret Service, Federal Trade Commission and Transportation Department websites were all down at varying points over the US Independence Day holiday weekend and into this week, according to American officials inside and outside the government. Others familiar with the US outage, which is called a denial of service attack, said that the fact that the government websites were still being affected three days after it began signaled an unusually lengthy and sophisticated attack. Yonhap said that prosecutors have found some of the cyber attacks on the ROK sites were accessed from overseas. Prosecutors were not immediately available for comment. Shin, the Information Security Agency official, said the initial probe had not yet uncovered evidence about where the cyber outages originated. Police also said they had not discovered where the outages originated. AP
(China Daily 07/09/2009 page11) |
