Shipbuilder Hack

[Anchor Lead]

South Korea's Defense Security Command says North Korea hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, which was building warships at the time, in April last year. The North stole 40,000 documents containing confidential military information on how to build Aegis destroyers and submarines, the core strategic weapons of the South Korean military.

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This is the South Korean Aegis ship Yulgok-YiYi. It can detect hundreds of targets and strike about two dozen of them at once. It has been discovered that some 40,000 documents were hacked and stolen from Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering in April last year, including data on how to build warships. South Korea's Defense Security Command says that judging by the hacking method and access records, the hacking attack was conducted by North Korea. What's particularly alarming is that the stolen documents include more than 60 highly classified military documents on the designs of strategic warships and submarines, such as the Yulgok YiYi, the Jangbogo-III submarine, the Tongyeong salvage ship and the Ulsan-class convoy Batch-II, as well as shipbuilding technologies and information on the weapons system. This means that North Korea may pinpoint the disadvantages of the South Korean military system or use its advantages to develop its own weapons. The non-classified leaked documents may also be used by the North to obtain significant information through big data analysis. Following the hacking attack, the military came under fire for commissioning the protection of highly classified national defense data to a private firm.