Hacking attack reported on Korean election watchdog site

The homepage of the National Election Commission stopped operations for about three minutes due to a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS, Tuesday, the day before the parliamentary elections.

A cyber terrorism police team said Wednesday that it began an investigation after access to the election watchdog’s website “Find Polling Booths (si.nec.go.kr)” was unavailable for 18 minutes from 11:02 p.m. to 11:20 p.m. Tuesday due to the attack.

According to police, the attack of 2.45 Gbps per second was launched on the server managing the Web page. The attack was 10 times stronger than one on the election watchdog’s homepage on the day of the Oct. 26 by-elections (263 Mbps) last year. The commission, however, minimized the damage because it moved the server to KT’s cyber emergency center.

The hackers that attacked the election watchdog last year conducted a test attack the day before the elections to launch a full-fledged assault. No additional attack was launched this time, however.

A police investigation found that another hacking attack was made for 34 minutes from 10:27 p.m. to 11:01 p.m. Tuesday, but the homepage’s operation was not affected because the attack was launched using non-existent IP addresses.

After the Oct. 26 attack, the election watchdog moved its main homepage server to the KT’s cyber emergency center, but is known to have taken no action on other servers.

neo@donga.com