By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter

The Ministry of National Defense will launch a cyber warfare command next month, officials said Tuesday.

The command will conduct both defensive and offensive cyber operations under the direction of the defense minister, they said.

Previously, the ministry had been considering establishing a cyber command under the control of the Defense Security Command (DSC), whose mission is to defend military networks against computer attacks.

The command will be led by a major general and have 200 specialists, the officials said.

Earlier this year, the DSC said the country's military computer networks faced about 95,000 reported hacking attacks per day on average.

In July, the government and industrial computer networks suffered from massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks for several days.

Some intelligence sources from South Korea and the United States blamed North Korea for the attacks, though no solid evidence has been found to support those claims.

North Korea is known to operate a cyber warfare unit that specializes in hacking into South Korean and U.S. military networks to extract classified information.

gallantjung@koreatimes.co.kr