South Korea Once Again Blames North Korea for Launching Hack like Against Its Defense Contractor

According to Korean Yonhap News Agency, the defense service for counter espionage in South Korea is investigating into one apparent hack by North Korea against major naval warship builder the Hanjin Heavy Industries & Construction Co. SK's suspicion is first on NK, in spite of absence of any clue.

Reports from local media, like Yonhap that first published a statement Defense Security Command of SK released indicates that they had started one probe into the system intrusion at Hanjin on 20th April.

Telling Yonhap, unnamed officials said that following detection of signs that a hack might've happened into Hanjin Heavy Industries on 20th April, an investigation was currently being done into if there had been leakage of any confidential military matters as also if NK was the culprit. The Defense Security Command was leading the probe, they added.

The contractor has been manufacturing Seoul's attack vehicles, particularly the ROKS Dokdo, and the most recent naval vessels.

Hacking attacks against SK's defense companies have occurred previously too. During November 2015, an investigation by the Defense Security Command looked at malicious codes being circulated as part of a hacking attack against LIG Nex1 that engaged in developing radar, named Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) to aid the KF-X (Korean Fighter Experimental) project. World.kbs.co.kr posted this, May 10, 2016.

Among other hacking instances against SK by NK, several security agencies, during February, released their findings about the probe into Sony hack, tracing the operators as Lazarus Group name of a cyber-spying team, to NK, a hack that USA pointed squarely to Pyongyang.

During October 2015, SK blamed government of NK for launching cyber-assaults on the subway transportation in Seoul. Further, same month, Symantec detected one cyber-spying scheme, which used a backdoor Trojan called Duuzer for surveillance operations vis-à-vis companies within manufacturing sector.

Moreover, during 2015 September, FireEye a security company unearthed one campaign utilizing one 0-day flaw within Hangul Word Processor that SK made for targeting the country's government staff.

Although not wholly substantiated that NK hackers launched a cyber-espionage scheme, Symantec disclosed information regarding zero-day vulnerability within IE was exploited within targeted spear-phishing assaults solely on SK organizations.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/17/2016