Officials: North is operating cyber warfare unit targeting Korea, U.S.

North Korea operates a cyber warfare unit that seeks to disrupt South Korean and U.S. military networks and visits U.S. military sites more frequently than any other country, intelligence sources in Seoul said yesterday.

The General Staff of the North’s Korean People’s Army has for years been operating a “technology reconnaissance team,” which is exclusively in charge of collecting information and disrupting military computer networks in South Korea and the U.S., the sources said, on condition of anonymity.

Roughly 100 hackers, mostly graduates of a leading military academy in Pyongyang, work on the team, hacking into South Korean and U.S. computer networks, downloading classified information and establishing combat simulations, they said.

“This unit tries to take control of South Korean and U.S. military information systems by hacking into their computer networks and taking out classified data. When necessary, they may spread computer viruses to disrupt the networks,” one of the sources said.

After years of tracking countries that access U.S. military Web sites and networks, the U.S. military has found that users inside North Korea logged on most frequently.

Yonhap