North Korea Responsible for July Cyber Attacks

North Korea's Internet warfare unit is responsible for cyber attacks that took place in the U.S. and South Korea in July.

North Korea has been identified as the source of high-profile cyberattacks in July that caused Web outages in South Korea and the United States, a news report said Friday.

South Korea’s main spy agency told lawmakers that the North’s Ministry of Post and Telecommunications uses the IP address — the Web equivalent of a street address or phone number — that triggered the Web attacks, the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported.

The North’s ministry leased the IP address from China, the report said, citing unidentified lawmakers briefed Thursday by the head of South Korea’s main spy agency, the National Intelligence Service.

The spy agency declined to confirm the report. Comments from legislators on the parliamentary intelligence committee were not immediately available.

The July attacks, in which floods of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in both countries. Affected sites include those of the White House and the South’s presidential Blue House.

North Korea was immediately suspected of involvement in the attacks but there has been little concrete evidence.

South Korean media reported at the time that North Korea runs an Internet warfare unit that tries to hack into U.S. and South Korean military networks to gather confidential information and disrupt service, and that the regime has between 500 and 1,000 hacking specialists.