S.Korean Army Officers Hit by N.Korean Spyware

S.Korean Army Officers Hit by N.Korean Spyware

A North Korean spyware e-mail was reportedly transmitted to the computer of a colonel at a field army command via China in early August. The e-mail contained a typical program designed automatically to steal stored files if the recipient opens it. It has not been confirmed whether military secrets were leaked as a result of the hacking attempt, but their scale could be devastating given that the recipient is in charge of the South Korean military's central nervous system -- Command, Control, Communication, Computer & Information (C4I). The incident shows that North Korea has enlarged its list of hacking targets to officers at field army commands, in addition to the homepages of Cheong Wa Dae, the Defense Ministry and top military brass to steal South Korean military secrets. It is also evident that Won Jeong-hwa, who was arrested for posing as a defector while spying for the North, delivered the name cards of 100 South Korean military officers she had collected to a North Korean official. Some officers whose email addresses are on their name cards have suffered hacking attacks. Early this year, a National Security Council official lost files stored in his computer after a hacking attack from China. North Korea has clearly widened the scope of cyber attacks. North Korea trains hackers. It established an electronic warfare bureau at the North Korean Army's General Staff in accordance with leader Kim Jong-il's instruction in the mid-1980s to prepare for the new battleground. An automation college teaching computer engineering was founded in Pyongyang in 1986, and its top graduates are mobilized by the People's Army and the Workers' Party to search the Internet and attack sites, North Korean refugees testify. The Defense Ministry believes that the skills of 500 to 600 North Korean hackers are on a par with those of CIA experts. In 1999, the department said it traced frequent cyber visitors and found that North Korea topped the list. The more the military command system of a country becomes computerized, the more it looks as though the determining factor in battle will be the ability to hack into and paralyze the enemy's command system first. We must not be negligent in discovering and preventing the North’s increasingly persistent and shrewd hacking attacks.