Cyber attack feared in series of South Korean government website outages

The PPS website used by all government institutions for making transactions froze for about an hour before it could be restored. - PHOTO: AFP

SEOUL: Another South Korean government-run online service suffered an outage on Nov 24, marking the fourth such failure within the past week.

A website and mobile applications providing online ID services went down, according to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety.

The breakdown in the government’s e-ID service on Nov 24 comes a day after a website run by the Ministry of Economy and Finance-affiliated Public Procurement Service (PPS) crashed on Nov 23.

The PPS website used by all government institutions for making transactions froze for about an hour before it could be restored.

The National Intelligence Service suggested the possibility of an attack, saying that at the time of the failure, an unknown agent with a foreign Internet Protocol address had tried to access the PPS web server.

“Some concentrated attacks targeting the website have been found,” it said in a release late on Nov 23, adding that it does not yet have the details of who was behind the attack, or what they were seeking.

A week prior on Nov 17, an online platform for processing civil complaints and an internal portal used by government workers for day-to-day operations broke down for at least a full day.

In a briefing over the weekend, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety overseeing the government networks, explained that a “glitch” appeared to be behind the failures.

The NIS then said it was looking at “all possible scenarios, including cyber attacks.”

Neither the Interior Ministry nor the NIS has yet provided an additional explanation or exact cause for the outages.

Experts say the series of outages calls for a full evaluation of the all government systems to verify their security from the latest cyberthreats.

Dr Kwon Hun-yeong, a cyber-security professor at Korea University, told The Korea Herald that “a full-scale assessment is necessary” to determine “if the legacy government systems are up to date on the latest computing environment, and fit to continue to manage our information resources”. - THE KOREA HERALD/ASIA NEWS NETWORK