The Anti Cyber Terrorism Center at the National Police Agency announced Thursday that it had detected 22 hackers based in Europe, including Rumania, Germany and Russia who had broken into some 4,000 sites in major domestic servers by utilizing a server owned by company "W" based in Michigan of the United States since August last year.
Hackers attacked 4,376, sites including 168 public institutes, 788 companies, 960 educational institutes, the domestically largest Internet firm "D," a governmental research institute "K" and six Internet security firms. The police also found traces of them accessing servers of universities and research institutes in the United States and Europe after hacking domestic server computers and was checking their access records into computers overseas.
Some of the hackers were found to have blocked overseas access of domestic servers and sending spam e-mails, or pornographic material. Police said the damage by the hacking accident was not that much, but some of institutes had seen their server computers being totally occupied by the hackers.
An official said international hackers pass through South Korea as the country is well equipped with an information infrastructure to the point where servers are found in elementary, middle, and high schools nationwide, adding, however, security system for domestic servers were weak.
(Moon Gab-shik, dhshin@chosun.com)
