Korea and the United States are pushing to hold regular joint exercises and train professionals to guard against growing threats of cyber attack from North Korea, a senior Seoul official said Wednesday.
Concerns over cyber attacks on military infrastructure and government and communications systems have mounted as Seoul believes Pyongyang was behind the jamming of GPS signals on civilian flights and commercial ships earlier this year and the hacking of government Web sites and banking systems in the last couple of years.
In defense talks that run from Wednesday through Thursday, senior military officials of the two sides will coordinate the agenda for next month's defense ministerial meeting and formulate concrete steps to deal with threats of cyber attacks and North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, a Korean official said.
"Joint training for cyber warfare and the training of professionals can be discussed as a means to prepare against cyber threats," a senior official said, asking for anonymity as the talks were still under way. "We will also discuss measures that can actually counter (North Korea's) nuclear threat, not just talk about the U.S. nuclear umbrella."
During the two-day meeting, the allies will discuss ways to operate a working group to craft concrete measures to launch regular anti-cyber warfare operations and programs to train professionals and also cooperate in the aerospace industry, he noted.
As a pre-step to bolster cyber defenses, military forces of the two nations conducted basic cyber warfare operations for the first time during last month's annual war exercise, according to military sources.
The meeting comes as the defense ministers of both countries are expected to meet at the Security Consultative Meeting (SCM) in late October to discuss ways to handle North Korea's nuclear program and major alliance issues when Seoul retakes wartime operational control of its troops from the U.S. in 2014.
The Korea-U.S. Integrated Defense Dialogue (KIDD) is an overarching structure that includes a series of alliance-related meetings such as the Extended Deterrence Policy Committee, the Strategic Alliance 2015 Working Group and the Security Policy Initiative. The two allies held the inaugural such meeting in April in Washington.
The two Koreas remain technically at war after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice. About 28,500 U.S. soldiers are stationed here to deter against the North Korean threat.(Yonhap)
