Computer hackers believed to be from North Korea, hacked into a South Korean defense department site and stole a large amount of classified military documents, a South Korean spokesman said on Wednesday.
The documents supposedly include the United States and South Korean war plans to wipe out the North Korean leadership.
Democratic Party representative Rhee Cheol-hee said in radio appearances on Wednesday that 235 gigabytes of military documents were taken from the Defense Integrated Data Center in September last year, citing information from unnamed South Korean defense officials.
This May an investigative team inside the defense ministry announced the hack had been carried out by North Korea, but did not disclosed what kind of information had been taken.
Pyongyang has denied responsibility for the cyberattacks in its state media, criticizing Seoul for “fabricating” claims about online attacks.
Rhee, currently a member of the National Assembly’s committee for national defense, said about 80 percent of the hacked data has not yet been identified, but that none of the information was expected to have compromised the South Korean military as it was not top classified intelligence.
Neither the US or the South Korean military will comment on anything relating to intelligence matters but spokesmen from both countries are assured that their war-time plans are safe.
Apparently, the hack was made possible by a contractor who performed maintenance on the computer in question and “inadvertently” left a connecting jack linking the military’s intranet with the internet which made the computer vulnerable to a hack.
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