Military bolsters readiness against N. Korea's cyber attack

SEOUL, June 2 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's military is taking stronger precautionary measures than usual against North Korea's apparent cyber attack on Army officers, officials said Thursday, accusing the North of trying to steal information from the officers' computers. North Korea is believed to have recently sent e-mail messages attached with malicious computer codes to South Korean military officers, attempting to dupe the receivers into believing that the virus-carrying e-mails come from graduates of the Korea Military Academy, officials said. If a user opens the attached file, his or her computer will be infected with a malicious computer code that is capable of stealing information or harvesting e-mail addresses from the computer to spread itself further, according to Defense Ministry officials. Since Sunday, the military's Cyber Warfare Command ordered military personnel to be cautious of attachments and not to open an e-mail from a suspicious sender. "We are bolstering precautionary measures after recently detecting that North Korea is spreading hacking e-mails to officers who graduated from the Korea Military Academy," a ministry official said on the condition of anonymity. "The attack of hacking e-mails is being continued for now," the official said. Ministry officials said the senders' addresses have used a South Korean domain, 'hanmail.net,' operated by a local portal site Daum. Officials said Internet protocol addresses in China used for the latest attack were identical to those used by the North in previous cyber attacks against South Korea. It is widely believed that some of the North Korean hackers were based in China, in an apparent bid to make it difficult to definitely identify them quickly, according to intelligence officials. Last month, South Korea blamed the North for waging a cyber attack against computer networks of a major local bank Nonghyup, disrupting the bank's ATM and credit card services for more than a week. The North denied the accusation.