By Kim Rahn
Seven adolescents committed a cyber attack on the website of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family because they didn’t like the ministry’s policies, police said Tuesday.
Officers said they rounded up the seven, including three elementary school children, on suspicions of conducting a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack on the government website.
They used programs that cause heavy traffic on a specific site and attacked the ministry over four times between Feb. 26 and 29, according to police.
“They used professional IT technology, including a program that changing IPs, so that they would avoid detection by pretending they were connecting to the site from an overseas country,” an officer said.
The ministry and police noticed the attack as it started and cut the IP, so the website was operating normally.
The teenagers met each other in an online community named “Anti-gender ministry community” and plotted the crime out of discontent with its policies.
The ministry has implemented policies such as banning young gamers from accessing online games at nighttime and putting “harmful to adolescents” labels on songs of idol groups because of cigarette- or drinking-related lyrics.
Among those apprehended, police booked a 16-year-old who led the crime, while sending the cases of a 13-year-old middle school student and a 12-year-old elementary schoolboy to the Seoul Family Court.
The other four were not booked.
“We have some important national events ahead, including the Nuclear Security Summit and the parliamentary elections. We’ll try to prevent cyber terrorism, such as DDoS attacks and hacking, on websites of the government or public organizations,” the officer said.