 National Intelligence Service |
Staff Reporter
The nation's spy chief has named North Korea's telecommunications ministry as the source of cyber attacks on Web sites in South Korea and the United States last July, lawmakers said Friday.
This is the first government confirmation of North Korea launching a series of cyber attacks using DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) which targeted major Web sites in the two countries.
``After tracking down the routes of the DDoS attacks, we found a line coming from China,'' Won Se-hoon, chief of the National Intelligence Service (NIS), was quoted as saying.
It turned out to be an IP that North Korea's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is renting, Won said during a closed-door National Assembly inspection of the agency Thursday.
But Won refused to elaborate, saying, ``Revealing further details could expose national strategies.''
A DDoS attack is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
The flood of incoming messages to a target system forces it to shut down and leads to denial of service to legitimate users.
After Web sites here and in the United States were severely attacked using this method, rumors arose that North Korea might have been behind the cyber attack.
The government, however, had remained silent.
Asked about reports that South and North Korea had preliminary talks on a possible inter-Korean summit, the spy chief refused to comment.
``I cannot confirm that because we are a concerned party,'' he said.
But he added that an inter-Korean summit can take place any time ``if it was helpful to resolve inter-Korean issues and the North Korean nuclear ambitions,'' according to Rep. Chung Chin-sup of the governing Grand National Party.
A visit to China by Kim Yang-gon, head of North Korea's Unification Front Department and long-time architect of inter-Korean relations, from Oct. 15 to 20 ignited rumors that he met with ranking South Korean officials in Singapore to discuss a summit between the two Koreas.
Officials of Cheong Wa Dae and other related ministries have repeated that they had no clue about the meeting.
Won said that the government is in talks with the North Korean regime but did not present details, according to the lawmakers.
Legislators who participated in the annual inspection said that he seemed to refer to previous working-level inter-Korean talks on flood prevention and Red Cross talks on the resumption of separated family reunions, both held last month.
ksy@koreatimes.co.kr
