Spy Agency Says hundreds of Government Sites Attacked


By Park Song-wu
Staff Reporter
The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Tuesday that the National Assembly and nine other government institutes related to national security, have recently been attacked by hackers in cyber space.

The spy agency said it considers the cyber attack a ``grave threat’’ to the national security.

The NIS confirmed that a total of 278 computers in 10 government organizations have been assaulted by two kinds of information-stealing viruses - the Peep Trojan and Backdoor Revacc.

``We found it through an investigation into the flow of viruses in mid-June when we first uncovered they infiltrated a number of personal computers in government institutes,’’ a National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) official told The Korea Times.

The NCSC, run by the NIS, announced on June 19 that 64 computers at six government agencies, including the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute and the Agency for Defense Development, were found to be infected by the hacking programs that were attached to e-mail via China.

It is not clear whether the hackers are Chinese because it is possible they may have only used the mainland as a gateway to Korea, online security experts said.

According to the NIS investigations, 69 computers in the parliament, many of them used by lawmakers, were contaminated with those virus programs. It also said hackers had stolen 122 passwords for e-mail IDs owned by parliamentary staffers and former and incumbent lawmakers.

The resultant damage from the ID theft has not been made available.

The NIS said it thinks the cyber attacks were systematically conducted by a group of hackers and promised to jointly deal with the threats with other government agencies, including the foreign ministry, information ministry and the Defense Security Command.

The Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry plans to ask the Beijing government via the Chinese Embassy in Seoul to start an inquiry into whether the country was used as a terminal for the cyber attacks against South Korea.

The Peep Trojan and the Backdoor Revacc programs typically come in the form of an e-mail attachment and execute themselves when unsuspecting recipients open the attached files.