Asia-Pacific

S Korean military probing hacking into war plan

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-12-18 13:28

SEOUL: South Korea's military authorities are looking into the alleged hacking into its classified war plan and some of military data Friday, Seoul's Yonhap News Agency reported.

The incident occurred late November when data on South Korea's Operational Plan 5027, a contingency war plan drawn up by South Korea and the United States in the event of an assumed invasion by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), was extracted through the Internet from a portable storage device that a military officer was using to transfer data to a wired computer, the report said, citing an unnamed military source.

"Eleven pages of Powerpoint slides explaining the war plan for visiting military officers have been hacked, not the whole content of the contingency plan," a South Korean military official was quoted as saying by Yonhap.

He added that it has been yet to be confirmed if the address originates from the DPRK.

In last July, a number of South Korean and American websites were hacked by a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks, which intelligence authorities in Seoul has attributed to the DPRK's presumed military personnel specializing in hacking.

However, the claim was disputed by many opposition party lawmakers here, who said the accusation is not based on solid evidence and thus is irresponsible.

The military officer would be reprimanded for the incident as prescribed by the military's disciplinary rules, Yonhap said.