14 DAY TRIAL // South Korean prosecutors claim the North is responsible for a cyber attack that crippled the systems of a bank last month causing it to halt operations for several days.
The attack led to a three-day service outage at the banking division of the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup), the second largest agricultural cooperative in the world.
Through its subsidiaries Nonghyup offers various services including banking ones aimed at commercial and retail customers.
Investigators traced the origin of the attack to a subcontractor's laptop that got infected back in September 2010.
The malware remained silent until the opportunity arose for its creators to spread further into Nonghyup Bank's network.
According to the evidence gathered so far, the malware strain matches that used in previous attacks originating in North Korea.
In particular, it was very similar to the one used in 2009 to launch crippling distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against government and commercial websites in the country.
In addition, ine of the IP address used in the Nonghyup Bank intrusion was also involved in a March 2011 DDoS attack.
The Seoul prosecutors' office is convinced North Korea is responsible for the incident that left people unable to access their finances or perform transactions for a significant period of time.
According to the BBC, the institution described the attack as "unprecedented cyber-terror deliberately planned" by the North.
Even in light of the cited evidence, it's hard to accept this theory because South Korean authorities have a habit of blaming their northern enemy for most cyber attacks.
They claim that North Korea has a specialized cyber warfare unit which uses Chinese Internet systems to mount their attacks. North Korea has little Internet coverage and access is only granted to very high ranking government officials
However, if attacks are launched from Chinese systems its very hard to tell who is responsible. China is known to host a very high number of vulnerable computers which can be commandeer and used by anyone with malicious intent.