From: Yonhap News Agency

SEOUL, Jan. 17 (Yonhap) — North Korea possesses considerable cyber hacking capabilities that can disrupt and immobilize Internet traffic and key computer systems, local experts said Thursday.

The communist country’s ability to hack into online systems generated new interest after officials on President-elect Park Geun-hye’s power transition team claimed earlier in the day that the North conducted an attack against the press room.

The latest move, if confirmed, comes after a string of cyber terrorist acts committed by Pyongyang in the past few years.

The first major case of cyber terrorism occurred on July 7, 2009 when 435 different servers in 61 countries were used to carry out a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against South Korean government Internet sites. This was followed by the 2011 March 4 DDoS disruption that again hit state institutions such as the presidential office, the National Assembly and media outlets. After these attacks, hacking traced to the North crippled South Korea’s agricultural cooperative’s web system and a university’s Web site, with the most recent case taking place against a conservative newspaper in June of last year.

Lee Dong hoon, a professor at the Center for Information Security Technologies at Korean University in Seoul, said the North has been preparing for cyber warfare since the late 1980s and may rank third worldwide in this field after Russia and the United States. He speculated that Pyongyang can carry out various electronic disruption campaigns using the Internet, hack into other vital systems and engage in psychological warfare.

“The country trains personnel under the centralized guidance of the government,” he pointed out. Intelligence sources said in the past, there may be up to several thousand dedicated hackers in the North.

Others such as Kim Heung-kwang, the executive director at the North Korea Intellectual Society, a group made of North Korean escapees, said Pyongyang has specialized hackers that are tasked to constantly find weak spots in important government or public Internet cyber systems.

Kim, who taught computer engineering in the North before his defection, said in most cases they are not successful, adding that they then might try to use “circuitous routes” to gain non-official but valuable information.

“The hacking of the transition team’s press room could be an example of such tactics,” he argued.

He pointed out that the North merged three specialized hacking agencies in February 2009 that have been placed under the military’s reconnaissance bureau.

On why the North may have attacked the press room, Yang Moo-jin, a political science professor at the University of North Korean Studies, speculated that they may be very interested in trying to discover how the next government may deal with the North.

“It may have been a deliberate attempt to gain information that they need,” he said.

A Unification Ministry official, meanwhile, said that while Seoul has moved to strengthen cyber related security for some time, particularly in the government sectors, the transition team seems to be using two separated servers, with reporters using a less secure line that can be hacked with some effort. Those in the transition team use servers protected by the National Intelligence Service.