South Korea spy chief confirms North Korea origin of July cyber attacks

The July attacks were carried out by flooding a single Web site server with overwhelming number of incoming remote connections, thus causing outages on prominent government-run sites in the U.S. and South Korea. Affected sites included those of the White House and South Korea's presidential Blue House. South Korean media reported that the North currently has between 500 and 1,000 hacking specialists.

The South Korean space agency said IP (Internet Protocol) address that triggered the Web attacks in July came from North Korea's Ministry of Post and Telecommunications.  Won Sei-hoon of the National Intelligence Service believes the North Korean ministry leased the IP address from China.

However, the spy agency declined to officially confirm the reports while two lawmakers in the parliament's intelligence committee refused to comment on the matter. The Unification Ministry, which monitors North Korea, also said it cannot comment on intelligence matters.

Computer experts say the Web attacks like those waged in July are not difficult to launch.

"Many different parties could pull this off. This was not a particularly complex ... attack to launch," Rod Beckstrom, former head of the National Cybersecurity Center in the U.S., said Friday during a visit to Seoul.

"It's definitely credible that anyone who had $50 million or a quarter-million dollars or a fairly limited amount of funding could hire hackers to go and perpetrate such an attack," Beckstrom said.