N. Korean military behind cyber attacks on S. Korea: spy agency

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SEOUL, July 10 (Yonhap) -- The North Korean military's cyber warfare unit appears
to be responsible for this week's massive cyber attacks on key South Korean and
U.S. government Web sites, Seoul's spy agency was quoted as telling lawmakers
Friday.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said in a closed-door briefing for
lawmakers that a research center called "Number 110," under the wing of the
General Staff of the People's Army, seems to have orchestrated the so-called
"distributed denial-of-service" (DDoS) attacks, in which 86 Internet protocol
addresses in 16 countries -- including South Korea, the United States, Japan,
China and Guatemala -- were used, according to a participant who asked not to be
named.
North Korea was not on the list, but that does not mean the secretive communist
nation was not involved in the attacks, the NIS said.
"The research center is a well-trained unit on cyber attacks," the participant said.
Speaking in public, Park Young-Sun from the main opposition Democratic Party also
said, "The NIS still suspects North Korea or pro-North Korean forces are behind
the attacks."
She said the spy agency provided no clear evidence of its suspicion, saying it
cannot be sure until the ongoing probe is completed."
One reason for the suspicion is that in response to a plan to take part in a
U.S.-led drill against cyber attacks, the North's Committee for the Peaceful
Reunification of Korea said last month that Pyongyang was "fully ready for any
form of high-tech war."
Since late Tuesday, Web sites operated by the government and media organizations,
along with major Internet portals in South Korea and the U.S. have reported
access delays and failures, apparently due to the DDoS attacks.
Such attacks use a multitude of infected computers to request information from a
single target, overloading it and causing legitimate users to be denied access.
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