North Korea accused of hacking South’s warship documents

North Korean cyber groups are facing allegations of hacking into rival South Korea’s warship documents and stealing some classified information. A South Korean opposition lawmaker has alleged that North Korean cyber groups hacked into South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering and stole 40,000 documents, out of which, 60 contained classified information. Kyung Dae-soo of the Liberty Korea Party said, “We are almost 100 percent certain that North Korean hackers were behind the hacking and stole the company’s sensitive documents”. Dae-soo, who received a briefing on the investigation also revealed that the hacking was discovered by a division under South Korea’s Defense Ministry in charge of investigating cases of cybercrime. A report in Japan Times quoted a spokeswoman for Daewoo Shipbuilding as saying that she was unaware of the issue and added that the company was in the process of confirming Dae-soo’s remarks. Dae-soo said that the investigative team came to the conclusion that North Korea had hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding because the hacking method was very similar to other attacks that North Korea was thought to be behind. However, an official linked to a North Korean association has denied that his country was involved in recent incidents of cybercrime in South Korea, Taiwan and the U.K. The official Korean Central News Agency quoted a spokesperson from the Korea-Europe Association as saying, “We made it very clear that the DPRK had no connection at all with acts of cybercrime”.