North Korea Accused of Stealing South’s Warship Documents, Denies involvement

About 60 classified documents were among 40,000 hacked from South Korea’s Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering in April 2016 allegedly by North Korean cyber groups.

The documents included information on construction technology, blueprints, weapons systems data, and evaluations of the ships and submarines, a South Korean opposition lawmaker said Tuesday.

 “We are almost 100 percent certain that North Korean hackers were behind the hacking and stole the company’s sensitive documents,” Kyung Dae-soo of the Liberty Korea Party was quoted in a telephonic interview to Japan times.

The hacking was discovered by a division under South Korea’s Defense Ministry in charge of investigating cases of cybercrime, said Kyung, who received a briefing on the investigation. The hacked data concerned South Korean warships, including an Aegis-class vessel and submarines which Daewoo Shipbuilding has built

South Korea’s Aegis missile system-equipped ships and submarines are key to defending Seoul should North Korea send a submarine equipped with ballistic missiles to target key facilities in the South.

The Japan Times report also quoted a spokeswoman for Daewoo Shipbuilding who said she was unaware of the issue and that the company was in the process of confirming the details of Kyung’s remarks.

The investigative team came to the conclusion North Korea had hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding because the hacking method was very similar to other attacks that North Korea was thought to be behind, Kyung said.

Meanwhile, 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 UK.

“We made it very clear that the DPRK had no connection at all with acts of cybercrime,” the official Korean Central News Agency reported, citing a spokesperson from the Korea-Europe Association.