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The South Korean Defense Ministry has disclosed a cyber attack on its website, causing outages.
On Tuesday (5 November), threat actors launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the ministry website, resulting in outages.
The following morning, the website for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) also suffered issues, leading to Cyber Operations Command and other agencies investigating the possibility of another DDoS attack.
The Defense Ministry site was restored quickly, according to reports, and an investigation has been launched to determine who was behind the incident.
While the threat actors are yet to be identified, Russian hackers said last week that they would be targeting South Korea after its Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun said that Seoul could monitor North Korean troop movements in Ukraine and Russia by sending its own observer personnel.
The group has already claimed to have targeted a granary in South Jeolla that stores grain from Ukraine.
It said that it gained access to the controls for loading the grain elevators and continuously loaded them “for a very long time” so that the grain would overflow onto the ground.
“We left all the equipment turned on at full power,” it said.
On Monday (4 November), the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) issued a warning stating that local businesses face a possible increased risk of cyber attacks as a result of North Korean troops being sent to Russia.
North Korea has also repeatedly launched cyber attacks on the south. According to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, North Korea launched 1.3 million cyber attacks per day on Republic of Korea institutions alone.
Additionally, South Korean law enforcement revealed that North Korean hackers had exfiltrated 1,014 gigabytes of data over a two-year period between 7 January 2021 and 9 February 2023.
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