North Korea creates fake Naver to steal personal information, NIS says

A fake Naver website created by North Korea [NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICE]

North Korea made a bogus Naver website to steal personal information, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said Wednesday.

The copycat website duplicated Naver's real-time newsstands, ads and menu sections with high similarity, according to the NIS.

Naver is South Korea's major portal.

The fake website is open under www.naverportal.com, whereas the real portal website is open under www.naver.com.

The NIS said North Korea has tried to steal the IDs and passwords of users here by imitating Naver's log-in page only in the past, but the recent attempt is more refined and intricate, which made discerning the fake website challenging.

The NIS notified the hacking to the government and public agencies and the Korea Internet & Security Agency to shut off the phishing website, which is currently inaccessible.

An NIS spokesperson said the agency is "tracking the hackers' activity by coordinating with an overseas agency because the server is located abroad."

Naver advised its users to exercise caution when accessing the portal.

"We ask users to access [Naver] safely with extra caution, double-checking if the domain is a normal one," a spokesperson for the company said.

BY SOHN DONG-JOO [sohn.dongjoo@joongang.co.kr]