By Na Jeong-ju
About 30 North Korean hackers educated at the country’s top universities developed hacking tools so a South Korean criminal gang could steal game items from local game sites, police and intelligence sources said Thursday.
The criminal gang shared earnings from the illegal trade of stolen items with the North Korean hackers, with part of the money presumed to have been transferred to the North Korean regime.
Police arrested five suspects, including a 40-year-old Korean-Chinese surnamed Lee, who worked for the South Korean criminals to hire the North Korean hackers and helped them stay in China.
Nine other people are also under investigation without detention, and two others are being sought, police said.
The revelation came amid suspicions that Pyongyang might have been behind a series of denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the South Korean government and private websites since 2009.
Most recently, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) alleged that an attack on the server of Nonghyup, or the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation in March, which paralyzed its banking network for days, was carried out by the communist country.
“The hacking tools developed by North Korean hackers, named ‘Auto Programs,’ made their way stealthily into more than 12,000 local computers and were used to steal game items,” Chung Kil-hwan, an officer from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, told reporters.
“The tools were also designed to use the host computers to conduct a cyber attack on local computer servers.”
During interrogations, Lee, the arrested Korean Chinese, told officers that some 30 North Korean hackers in their 20s worked with him.
All of them were educated at Kim Il Sung University and Kim Chaek University of Technology, the top schools in the North.
A North Korean hacker once told Lee that the group had sent $500 each month to the North Korean authorities after receiving “license fees” from the South Korean criminals.
Police suspect that up to 10,000 North Korean hackers are sending some $5 million every month to their impoverished home country, estimating that hacking has become an important source of earning foreign currency for Pyongyang.
The North is known to operate a cyber warfare unit that specializes in infiltrating South Korean and U.S. military networks to extract classified information.
South Korean intelligence officials say the North’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance is responsible for training young hackers and sending them overseas for operations.
Officer Chung also said the hackers had stolen personal information of some 660,000 people from local peer-to-peer sites and delivered it to the South Korean criminals. Using the stolen data, they created accounts at game sites to steal items, he said.