Student caught for cyber attack

By Kim Bo-eun

Police said Friday that they have apprehended a high school student for launching an attack on an online shopping service that caused it to crash.

The 18-year-old suspect, surnamed Won, used “zombie” computers to attack the shopping mall with a distributed denial of service (DDoS), and will face charges of violating the communication law, police said.

The student attacked the shopping site, Thursday, which was managed by a 17-year-old girl he had met online. After causing the server to crash, he then hacked the personal information of 5,000 online members and stripped them of their membership.

About 500 zombie computers were reportedly used for the attack. However, some 4,000 computers were affected, causing inconvenience for around 30 minutes.

Won attacked the site because he believed the 17-year-old girl wrote an offensive comment on a post he had uploaded, according to police.

“Won had been hanging around with friends who share his interests in hacking,” said a police officer.

The officer said the rate of cyber crimes, including DDoS attacks, committed by teenagers is on the rise.

The figures were 30.5 percent in 2009 and 31.5 percent in 2010.

Teenagers accounted for 33.7 percent, or 915 out of 2,711 cyber attack cases in 2011, according to the Cyber Terror Response Center at the National Police Agency.

bkim@koreatimes.co.kr Experts say that this is because youngsters do not realize the gravity of crimes committed online.

“For teenagers, cyber crimes such as making zombie computers are just a form of entertainment,” said Kim Sul-ryul, professor at the Internet and Multimedia Engineering department at Konkuk University.

“It is necessary to teach them that cyber crimes are also serious and that they can be subject to strict punishment,” he said.