Over 2,700 hacking on military Web sites

More than 2,700 hacking attempts to infiltrate South Korea's military Web sites have been made in the last 14 months, a government report showed Thursday, raising concerns over growing cyber threats to the military security system. The Ministry of National Defense said that its Cyber Command has detected a total of 2,772 attempts to break into the official Web sites of military forces from July last year until the end of August. But there was no damage to its internal server because the sites are hosted elsewhere, it noted. The Cyber Command was launched last year to counter North Korean hacking threats following a series of attempts blamed on Pyongyang on several government Web sites. The Army's Web site was the most frequent target of hacking with 674 attempts, followed by the Ministry of National Defense with 640, Air Force with 443 and Navy with 34, said the report, which was submitted for an annual parliamentary audit. Meanwhile, there were also nearly 2,000 hacking attempts on 28 state-funded research institutes in South Korea in the year since July 2010, according to a report by the National Security Research Institute (NSRI). Each organization was attacked 2.8 times a month on average during the cited period, while the Korea Development Institute received the most attacks with 118 attempts, followed by the Korea Transport Institute with 91 times and the Korean Educational Development Institute with 78 times, the NSRI data said. More than half of the hacking attempts were made in the form of computer worms, self-replicating malware programs, the institute said. About 70 percent of Internet Protocol addresses used in the attacks came from abroad, with 264 in China and 260 in the United States, it said, adding one was based in North Korea.