According to news reports, citing an intelligence briefing, a North Korean army lab of hackers were behind the recent cyberattack on South Korean and American Web sites. They were ordered to destroy South Korean communications networks.

North Korean recent boast that it was “fully ready for any form of high-tech war” has helped in pointing the finger at it. “The National Intelligence Service told about a research institute affiliated with the North’s Ministry of People’s Armed Forces receiving an order to “destroy the South Korean puppet communications networks in an instant,” as reported by the mass-circulation JoongAng Ilbo newspaper.

The paper reported that the institute is known as Lab 110 and it specializes in hacking and spreading malicious programs.

Photo courtesy: JoongAng Ilbo

The NIS, South Korea’s main spy agency, could not confirm the report but it issued a statement late Saturday which says that the agency has “various evidence” of North Korean involvement.

The state-run Korea Communications Commission reported having identified and blocked five Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses in five countries which were used to distribute viruses causing the wave of Web site outages. The outages began in the U.S. on July 4. The countries were said to be Austria, Georgia, Germany, South Korea and the U.S. The virus triggered denial of service attacks wherein huge numbers of computers try to connect to a single site at the same time which overwhelm the server.

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