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South Korean conservative activists burn placards during an anti-North Korean rally in Seoul in July. The activists were denouncing the North’s cyber attacks. South Korea’s spy chief has blamed North Korea’s telecommunications ministry for cyber attacks that briefly crippled US and South Korean government and commercial websites in July, reports said Friday.

South Korea’s spy chief has blamed North Korea’s telecommunications ministry for cyber attacks that briefly crippled US and South Korean government and commercial websites in July, reports said Friday.

It was the first time the National Intelligence Service had named a specific body as the user of the Internet protocol (IP) address linked to the attacks, Yonhap news agency and local newspapers reported.

“Our search into the route of the attacks on South Korean and US sites found a line coming from China,” intelligence service chief Won Sei-Hoon told a parliamentary session Thursday, according to Yonhap.

His remarks were quoted by lawmakers who attended the private meeting.

“The line was found to be on the IP that the North Korean Ministry of Post and Telecommunications is using on rent (from China),” Won was quoted as saying.

He reportedly refused to comment further, saying that to “answer in specifics would risk revealing national strategies.”

Intelligence officials refused to confirm the reports.

The National Intelligence Service had said in July that North Korea was a prime suspect in the “distributed denial of service” attacks designed to swamp selected websites with traffic.

The attackers infected tens of thousands of “zombie” computers with a virus which programmed them to send a flood of requests for website access.

But the origin of the attacks was never confirmed, with one Vietnamese expert saying they originated from a master server in Britain.

Experts say North Korea maintains elite hacker units.

The threat of cyber warfare by its neighbour has prompted South Korea to establish a specific military command, which will be active by next year.

Last week Lieutenant General Jeffrey Remington, commander of the US Air Force in South Korea, called on Washington and Seoul to take “aggressive steps” to safeguard their military computer networks from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.

© 2009 AFP