Document shows N. Korea responsible for cyber attacks: party official

SEOUL, July 11 (Yonhap) -- South Korea's main government spy agency has obtained
a North Korean document ordering its military hacking unit to "destroy" the
South's communication networks, a ruling party official said Saturday.
A number of South Korean government and business Web sites, including the
presidential Cheong Wa Dae, came under massive cyber attacks for three days
earlier this week that severely slowed access to them.
In a briefing to a group of ruling Grand National Party officials on Saturday,
the National Intelligence Service said it is confident that North Korea was
involved in the attacks, said one party official who attended the briefing.
"The intelligence obtained a document in which North Korea ordered on June 7 a
hacking unit, 'Number 100,' under the wing of the General Staff of the People's
Army, to destroy puppet communication networks of the South," the Grand National
Party official said, asking that he remain anonymous.
In the purported North Korean document, Pyongyang's military also ordered the
unit to develop hacking programs that conceal the identity of the attackers,
according to the party official.
In a closed-door meeting of the National Assembly's information committee a day
earlier, the intelligence agency also held North Korea responsible for the
attacks but did not provide any concrete evidence.
Key South Korean Web sites that come under attack also included the Ministries of
Defense and Foreign Affairs, commercial banks and a major newspaper. By Saturday,
all those sites were back up and running normally, officials said.
On Friday, the nation's telecom regulator, the Korea Communications Commission,
blocked five Internet addresses found to have diffused the malicious codes that
launched the so-called "distributed denial-of-service (DDos)" attacks.
DDos attacks invite massive amounts of computers to a single site simultaneously,
bringing a server into a breakdown.
pbr@yna.co.kr
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