Seoul, July 7 (IANS) Official websites of the South Korean presidential office and the foreign ministry were hacked Wednesday, a national telecommunications regulator said.
Websites of the presidential office, the ministry of foreign affairs and trade, and private firms, including Internet search engine Naver, Nonghyup Bank and the Korean Exchange Bank, were hit by distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks at around 6.00 p.m. (9 a.m. GMT), Xinhua reported citing state-run Korean Communications Commission (KCC).
Emergency counter-measures have been taken and no specific damage has been reported so far, the KCC said. The commission is currently analysing the origin of the attacks.
A year ago, a large-scale DDoS attack shut down 25 internet sites in the country for days.
The KCC, however, said the attacks were ‘at a very low level’ compared to what occurred last year, and posed no major threat.
The attacks may have also been triggered by a virus that was not completely removed from the computers exposed to attacks last year, it said.
