The Marmot’s Hole

Being the world’s most wired country can have its drawbacks:

The National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Tuesday that the National Assembly and nine other government institutes related to national security, have recently been attacked by hackers in cyber space.

The spy agency said it considers the cyber attack a “grave threat” to the national security.

The NIS confirmed that a total of 278 computers in 10 government organizations have been assaulted by two kinds of information-stealing viruses - the Peep Trojan and Backdoor Revacc.

“We found it through an investigation into the flow of viruses in mid-June when we first uncovered they infiltrated a number of personal computers in government institutes,” a National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) official told The Korea Times.

The NCSC, run by the NIS, announced on June 19 that 64 computers at six government agencies, including the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses, the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute and the Agency for Defense Development, were found to be infected by the hacking programs that were attached to e-mail via China.

It is not clear whether the hackers are Chinese because it is possible they may have only used the mainland as a gateway to Korea, online security experts said.

Hey, even the National Assembly got its pockets picked:

According to the NIS investigations, 69 computers in the parliament, many of them used by lawmakers, were contaminated with those virus programs. It also said hackers had stolen 122 passwords for e-mail IDs owned by parliamentary staffers and former and incumbent lawmakers.

This wasn’t the work of lone hackers, either:

The NIS said it thinks the cyber attacks were systematically conducted by a group of hackers and promised to jointly deal with the threats with other government agencies, including the foreign ministry, information ministry and the Defense Security Command.

Good luck with the information ministry — it’s been two weeks since they imposed a ban on the Kim Sun-il beheading video, and they still haven’t figured out how to return access to Blogspot and Typepad blogs. However, I’m not sure that the following plan of attack is going to be any more successful:

The Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry plans to ask the Beijing government via the Chinese Embassy in Seoul to start an inquiry into whether the country was used as a terminal for the cyber attacks against South Korea.

I’m sure the Chinese government is going to be real cooperative with this investigation. However, allow me to take myself off the list of potential bad guys — I’m having enough trouble as it is learning .css.

Chosun Ilbo piece here.