Eleven South Korean online media outlets were hacked on Tuesday, including Seoul President Park Geun Hye and Prime Minister Chung Hong Won's websites, the government reported.
On the same day that the Korean War began 63 years ago, 131 South Korean servers were shut down due to the Internet blitz.
According to director-general of Science Ministry's IT Strategy Bureau Park Jae Moon who spoke at a press conference on Tuesday, South Korea brought up their scale of national cyber-attack alert from level three to level five once they noticed that Geun Hye and Chung's homepages had been compromised. Level three alerts are typical-they are issued for website damage or when sites experience technical difficulties for more than one hour.
Bloomberg reported that Chung's site began acting up for about two minutes before the government closed the server down to check out the situation at 9:29 a.m. One minute later, President Park Geun Hye's website experienced difficulties, presidential spokesperson Lee Mi Yon said. Both websites were restored by 7:15 p.m. local time.
Government officials in Asia have not discerned who is responsible for the attacks, but local media service Yonhap News ventured a guess that North Korea participated in some site-hacking. They did not cite a source for this conclusion.
"We can't identify at this stage who did the hacking," Science Ministry's Park explained. "We can make comments after the result of an investigation comes out."
Just three months ago, South Korea was hit by an intense series of cyber-attacks-the worst Seoul encountered since 2011. Banks and TV stations were tampered with; more than 30,000 damaged servers had to be shut down. In April, the Science Ministry claimed that it had reason to believe that North Korea incited the hacking-Pyongyang quickly refuted those claims.
Currently, ten South Korean government organizations are conducting an investigation into the Internet attacks.
