S. Korean military susceptible to cyber terrorism: intelligence officials

By Sam Kim
GWACHEON, South Korea, June 16 (Yonhap) -- The South Korean military remains
vulnerable to cyber attacks as an average of 15,000 attempts are made daily to
hack into its computer systems, intelligence officials said Tuesday.

"Eighty-nine percent of them are simple attempts to hack into servers and
Internet homepages, while 11 percent are sophisticated attempts to extract
military intelligence," the Defense Security Command (DSC) said in a statement,
calling it a 20 percent increase compared with last year.
The DSC, which hosted a one-day conference on cyber security in the city of
Gwacheon, just south of Seoul, did not say where the attacks originated.
Speaking at the conference, Yoo Ho-jin, a National Intelligence Service official,
said his agency has recently proposed the president name an aide to deal with
cyber security.
"Our country continues to be vulnerable. Some of our government branches failed
to function when we recently simulated a cyber attack on them," he said. "This is
a grave threat to our national security."
A South Korean defense source said earlier this year that North Korea operates a
cyber warfare unit that seeks to disrupt South Korean and U.S. military networks.
The North's Korean People's Army has been operating for years a "technology
reconnaissance team," which is exclusively in charge of collecting information
and disrupting military computer networks in South Korea and the U.S., the source
said on condition of anonymity.
Roughly 100 hackers, mostly graduates of a leading military academy in Pyongyang,
are in the team, hacking into South Korean and U.S. computer networks, the source
said.
samkim@yna.co.kr
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