South Korea to create unit fighting cybercrime

Date: July 10, 2004
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: Ludmila Goroshko

South Korean National Police Department will create a new unit of computer anti-terror by the end of this year. Police management came to the necessity of such step after they had encountered attempts to hack governmental information networks and distribution of information like beheading of a Korean hostage in Iraq on the Net.

Heretofore only several experts of central police department were engaged in fighting cyber terrorism; from then on a new unit will comprise of 110 people and will be headed by a high rank police official.

It will include four departments structurally: on prevention of terrorism activity in cyberspace, on development of new technologies to fight hackers, on investigation of computer crimes committed on the Internet, and on provision of international support with foreign colleagues.

The history of fight against computer crime in South Korea starts with the creation of a department on investigation of computer crimes accomplished by hackers in 1995. August 1997 it was extended and numbered ten people. Now, when three thousand of Korean soldiers are going to Iraq, National Police Department fairly consider that computer systems of governmental bodies will become targets for virtual attacks of Iraqi rebels and hackers of various militant units.

The most serious display of computer terrorism was the attempt to hack into networks of six governmental agencies including Korean Institute for Defence Research. Since May 2003, the date of US military assault on Iraq, different anti-militant and anti-American organizations, even from Brazil, tried to break 60 of local websites.

---

Add comment  Email to a Friend