A Seoul man has been arrested on suspicion of colluding with a North Korean reconnaissance unit in China and distributing game programs infected with malignant codes to Korea, police said Monday.

The man, only identified by his family name Cho, was apprehended after allegedly meeting in September 2009 with several spies, including a man surnamed Kim, from the North's Reconnaissance General Bureau in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang and providing tens of millions of won for developing the illegal software, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said.

The 39-year-old Cho is accused of communicating on several occasions to develop the infected games with the spies, who had set up a cyber hacking base disguised as a trading firm in China, and selling them in South Korea, according to the police.

Cho, knowing that the games were infected, reportedly turned to the North's reconnaissance unit in order to develop the games at a cheap price, the police said.

Cho is also accused of setting up a server in South Korea that was used by the North Korean spies in their attempts to hack into the South's computer network via a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack using "zombie" computers infected with a virus, the police added.

The police said they will investigate Cho for further crimes, as he is found to have retained the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people from major South Korean portals. (Yonhap)