Korea

Part of the mystery shrouding the cyberattacks on South Korea has been lifted. Online security firm Symantec revealed on Wednesday that one single group — codenamed the DarkSeoul Gang — is responsible for four years of cyberattacks against the country.

The cyberattacks have been persistent over the past few years, with the country's authorities blaming its neighbors and enemies from North Korea. The most recent of the many attacks came on Tuesday, but perhaps the most massive one hit South Korean banks and TVs in March, wiping off multiple hard drives.

 Major government and media websites in South and North Korea were shut down for hours Tuesday on the 63rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Seoul said its sites were hacked, while it was unclear what knocked out those north of the border.

Seoul said experts were investigating attacks on the websites of the South Korean presidential Blue House and prime minister's office, as well as some media servers. There were no initial reports Tuesday that sensitive military or other key infrastructure had been compromised.

The Japanese government's data protection policies have been called into question after it emerged that a decommissioned coast guard vessel was sold to a pro-North Korea organisation without any checks as to whether key data on board was first deleted.

The 106-ton Japan Coast Guard patrol boat Takachiho was taken out of service in 2011 and sold to a ship breaker run by a senior figure from the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon), according to the Yomiuri Shimbun.

The malware that paralyzed the internal computer network at agricultural lender Nonghyup during a massive cyber attack on banks and broadcasters here last Wednesday has been traced to one of its own IP addresses, not a Chinese IP address as originally believed.

But that does not necessarily mean the attack was launched by a South Korean hacker because the Nonghyup IP address is believed to be that of an intermediate router rather than the original source of the cyber-attack.

The website of a U.S. group focused on human rights in North Korea was hacked at the same time as a cyberattack on South Korean targets on Wednesday.

Only the website was affected and 'Hitman 007-Kingdom of Morocco' was superimposed on a photo of a political prison camp in North Korea, usually posted on the website, said Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea (HRNK) in Washington, D.C.

A cyber-attack in South Korea on Wednesday took the networks of several companies offline. While some recovered in a matter of hours, South Korea's public broadcasting organization, KBS, is still offline. But the identity of the person or group behind the attacks is still an open question—one muddied by the hackers who are taking credit for at least part of it. It's not clear at this point if the attack was state-sponsored, cyber-warfare by North Korea or simply an act of cyberterrorism by hackers looking to make a virtual name for themselves.

The Pirate Bay says it has been offered virtual asylum in North Korea. The move comes after the Norwegian Pirate Party was forced to stop routing traffic for the infamous BitTorrent site by a local copyright group. “We can reveal that we have been invited by the leader of the Republic of Korea, to fight our battles from their network,” the Pirate Bay says. A traceroute indeed suggests that The Pirate Bay is now being routed through the dictatorial country.

North Korea was behind a hacking attack on the conservative Joongang Ilbo in June last year, according to the National Police Agency's Cyber Terror Response Center.

The North launched two massive so-called distributed denial-of-service attacks on various targets in South Korea on July 7, 2009 and March 4, 2011, hacked into Nonghyup Bank's computer systems, and used malicious codes to access the e-mail accounts of students and alumni of Korea University. Then in June 2012 it struck the newspaper's website.

Picture the scene: dozens of computer hackers poring over their keyboards in a room filled with powerful computers, feverishly typing in code most of us could never comprehend.

Their mission? To "break in" to virtual servers in a simulated world.

Yet these particular hackers are not breaking the law, they are actually reinforcing it. They are taking part in a six-month program organized by the South Korean government to train some of the brightest code-breaking minds to become the nation's first line of defense in the war against cyber crime.

L33tdawg: "... also at a level that wasn't overwhelming" - Is it just me, or does that sound quite demeaning?

Computer security conferences tend to be male-dominated affairs. It's not that women aren't present, but just not anywhere near their normal proportional representation in society.