Seoul’s spy agency has yet to be sure that North Koreans were behind recent cyber attacks on South Korea and the US but it still sees Pyongyang as a prime suspect, officials said yesterday.
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a statement it was still looking into “various pieces of evidence” indicating that North Koreans might have orchestrated the attacks against South Korean and US government and private websites.
“The NIS ... has yet to reach a final conclusion that the acts have been committed by North Korea,” the statement said.
It denied a report by Chosun Ilbo newspaper on Saturday that the NIS had found an Internet protocol (IP) address used by a North Korean hacker surnamed Yun, who could be behind the cyber attacks.
It said the Chosun Ilbo report went “too far” and urged local media outlets to be prudent in reporting on the case.
Hackers have planted viruses in thousands of personal computers in South Korea, one of the world’s most wired societies, as well as overseas. These mounted “distributed denial of service” attacks designed to seek simultaneous access to selected sites and swamp them with traffic.
The Korea Communications Commission in Seoul said yesterday more than 690 personal computers had been damaged in the wake of the cyber raid.
The attacks that had crippled some South Korean government Web sites have now come under control after virus-infected “botnet” hosting servers were isolated and “vaccine” programs were widely distributed to PC users.
The state-run Korea Communications Commission has said that tens of thousands of computers were infected. The commission says it has identified and blocked five Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses in five countries used to distribute computer viruses that caused the wave of Web site outages, which began in the US on July 4.
They were in Austria, Georgia, Germany, South Korea and the US, a commission official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media on the record.
Meanwhile, the police are analyzing a sample of the tens of thousands of infected computers used to crash the Web sites.
The JoongAng Ilbo reported on Saturday that the NIS had told lawmakers on Friday that a North Korean military research institute had been ordered to destroy the South’s communications networks.
The paper, citing unidentified members of parliament’s intelligence committee, said the institute, known as Lab 110, specializes in hacking and spreading malicious programs.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency carried a similar report, saying the NIS obtained a North Korean document issuing the June 7 order.
The report, quoting an unidentified senior ruling party official, said the North Korean institute is affiliated with the North Korean People’s Army.
An Chan-soo, a senior police officer investigating the cyberattacks, said yesterday that investigators had obtained 27 computers infected with malicious computer code, known as malware, in an attempt to trace the “contamination paths” of the programs that launched the attacks.
North Korea has not responded to the allegations of its involvement in the Web site outages.
The assaults appear to be on the wane. No new similar cyberattacks have been reported in South Korea since Friday evening, the state-run Korea Information Security Agency said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS