North Korea behind cyber attack: South Korea

Seoul, April 10 (IANS) The South Korean government Wednesday confirmed that North Korea was behind the March 20 cyber attack that paralyzed computer networks at banks and broadcasters.

“The series of cyber attacks last month resembled North Korea’s past hacking patterns,” the Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning said at a press briefing.

“Evidences (showed) that North Korea’s reconnaissance general bureau did the act.”

On March 20, computer networks at three banks and three broadcasters suffered the cyber attack, crippling about 48,700 PCs and servers, reported Xinhua.

On March 25, there was an attempt to hack PCs of the ordinary people, while computer files at the broadcaster YTN’s 58 PCs were destroyed and data at anti-North Korean organizations’ homepage were deleted the following day.

Based on 76 malicious codes used for the hacking and Internet access records collected, the March cyber attack was planned at least eight months ago by indirectly planting malware in advance, according to the probe results by the government-led investigation team.

The investigation team found that six PCs in North Korea directly or indirectly accessed the infected computers some 1,590 times, among which Internet Protocol (IP) address linked directly to North Korea was spotted 13 times.

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