DPRK denies cyber attacks against ROK officials

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea on Sunday denied that it conducted cyber attacks against officials from rival Republic of Korea, calling the ROK's accusation that it did so a "fabrication".

The ROK's spy agency told lawmakers on Friday that the DPRK had recently stepped up cyber attack efforts against the ROK and succeeded in hacking the mobile phones of 40 national security officials, according to members of parliament who received a closed-door briefing.

"The South is claiming the North's cyber attack and using it for its own political purpose," an opinion piece in the Rodong Sinmun, the official daily newspaper of the DPRK's ruling party, said on Sunday.

It accused the ROK of making the cyber attack claim in order to justify a controversial new "anti-terrorism" law.

"There is nothing to expect but the sound of eating corpses from a crow's mouth. However, we cannot just overlook the south's abrupt, provocative, and heinous accusations against its neighbor," the article said.

Earlier in the week, the ROK's National Intelligence Service also said the DPRK had tried to hack into email accounts of the ROK'S railway workers in an attempt to attack the transport system's control system, although it said it had interrupted the hacking attempt against the railway workers and closed off their e-mail accounts.

The ROK has been on heightened alert against the threat of cyber attacks by the DPRK after it conducted a nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch last month, triggering new UN sanctions.

Tensions are also heightened on the Korean peninsula as the ROK and the United States conduct annual joint military exercises that the ROK said are the largest ever and on Sunday included the arrival in the ROK of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C Stennis.

The DPRK has denounced the exercises as "nuclear war moves" and threatened to respond with an all-out offensive.

The DPRK denied the ROK'S previous accusation that it conducted cyber attacks against the ROK's nuclear operator.

The United States accused the DPRK of a cyber attack against Sony Pictures in 2014 that led to the studio cancelling the release of a comedy based on the fictional assassination of the country's leader, Kim Jong-un. The DPRK denied the accusation.