By Kim Tae-jong
Police launched an investigation into alleged massive cyber attack on the website of the National Election Commission (NEC), Wednesday, which prevented people from accessing it for about two hours.
According to the National Police Agency’s Cyber Terror Response Center, the NEC’s website crashed from 6:15 a.m. to 8:32 a.m. due to what it suspects was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
Separately, the website of Park Won-soon, the unified liberal candidate for the Seoul mayoral by-election, was also believed to have been hit by a DDoS attack.
“We’re now investigating to find out the main Internet Protocol (IP) address that attacked the sites,” a police officer said. “If the victims request an official investigation, we will closely look into the crashes to find out who was behind them.”
To make the site accessible, Park’s campaign group temporarily used another server.
“The first attack was detected around 1 or 2 a.m. and we took an emergency measure around 3 or 4 a.m.,” an official from the camp said. “The attack continued and we couldn’t properly tackle it so we had to use another server to run our site.”
The NEC also said operations were normalized about two hours after the attack, but they continued to monitor it.
Park’s rival Na Kyung-won of the ruling Grand National Party did not report any cyber attack on her official website.