By Jung Min-ho
Two cyber security experts have been arrested for allegedly hacking into an illegal gambling website after accepting payment from a co-owner of a rival firm, police said Tuesday.
According to the National Police Agency, the owner of a security company, surnamed Yang, and his employee, surnamed Lee, received one billion won ($911,000) from an illegal gambling website operator since May last year in return for attacking the website of a competitor.
The hackers disabled the rival website multiple times through distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, police said.
A DDOS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.
Police found that they hacked into 12,000 computers at six banks on Sept. 25 in order to use their signals for DDOS attacks.
Officers are looking into whether there are other hacking cases in which they were involved.
Yang, a former college professor who taught computer science, gave special lectures at IT companies, banks and government organizations, police said.
“Yang said he committed the crime because his income was unstable,” an officer said.
Sports Toto is the only form of licensed sports gambling in Korea. But police believe that tens of thousands of gamers, including minors, gamble through illegal websites, making bets that amount to billions of won per game.