By Kim Yoo-chul
Although it is still experiencing cyber attacks, they have had no effect on nuclear reactor operations, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Company (KHNP) CEO Cho Seok said Sunday.
“We are detecting signals that are indicative of ongoing attempts to penetrate our intranet but defenses have been activated to thwart them,” Cho told a news conference.
He played down the damage by days of online attacks, saying, “It is only four PCs that have been affected.”
Cho has been under fire for allegedly taking a lackadaisical approach to the hacking attack.
He told reporters that material related to the nuclear plants that the attackers revealed was believed to have been stolen before the attack began.
KHNP has not found who is responsible for the theft of internal documents. Some senior government officials have ruled out North Korea as a culprit.
Christmas, the D-Day that the hackers threatened to make the biggest attack, passed without incident.
“If the purpose of the attacks was to cause social confusion, the attackers may claim they achieved a degree of success,” he said. “However, they cannot gain access to the core operating system.”
Cho promised to beef up cyber security, while apologizing for an accident at the construction site of a nuclear reactor Friday that killed three workers. Korea has 23 nuclear reactors which supply one-third of its electrical demand.
Still, some inside KHNP said Cho’s reactions are “business as usual,” and not seeking a more reliable solution.
“Reactors are wide-open to another hack attack. KHNP officials spend most of their time monitoring the situation without sleep, cutting Internet connections and installing additional firewalls,” said an official at the company asking not to be identified. “That is not a fundamental solution.”
“Without implementing stronger measures, other sensitive sites could be hacked soon,” said the official.
Meanwhile, North Korea denied any involvement, Sunday.
“South Korea is blindly trying to link the recent hacking of its nuclear power stations to us,” said the Rodong Sinmun, an organ of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party. “This is a totally groundless fabrication.”
Seoul is seeking the help of China over the attack after the IP address of a suspected hacker was traced to the Chinese city of Shenyang, the border city between China and the North where Pyongyang is known to have units with cyber experts.
Separately documents filed by the KHNP to the National Assembly annual audit showed that the company had only 53 security experts out of a total of 19,693 employees at the end of the third quarter.
From 2010 to the third quarter of this year, hackers have tried to access nuclear reactors.
Yoon Kwang-taek, a senior executive at Symantec Korea, a top-rated supplier of anti-virus software, urged the government to increase spending on strengthening cyber security at key facilities by hiring more experts.