The Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office has apparently concluded that North Korean hackers were behind a cyber attack on agricultural cooperative lender Nonghyup. The office believes hackers planted a virus in a laptop owned by an IBM Korea employee who was in charge of maintaining the computerized network at the lender, causing it to order the network to shut down.
The IBM employee's laptop turned into a so-called "zombie PC" that was infected with a malicious program through a website or spam mail and then used to launch a cyber attack.
Prosecutors will announce their findings in a press conference early this week. They have apparently concluded that North Korea was behind the attack because most of the IP addresses that that logged on to the IBM staffer's laptop to execute the destruction command were the same that had been used during so-called massive hacker attacks in July 2009 and in March this year.
The IBM worker's laptop became infected when he took it outside Nonghyup several times and used it to log on to other websites, and the cyber attack took place when he then used it to access the lender's computerized network.
Prosecutors have been unable to determine whether North Korean hackers rented a server in China to launch the attack as they did during the previous ones.
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