The websites of South Korean courts temporarily went down Thursday afternoon, a day after South Korean military websites suffered similar outages. The court websites, including that of the country’s largest Seoul central district court, were inaccessible due to suspected cyberattacks. The court administration office told reporters it suspects a distributed denial of service attack, in which servers are overwhelmed with large amounts of traffic to block access, by a potential foreign source

South Korea’s political sphere expressed divided opinions on President Yoon Suk Yeol’s public address delivered Thursday, with the main opposition party criticizing it as a speech “full of excuses” and the ruling party praising it as “honest.” In the televised address and press conference marking the second half of his term, Yoon did not directly mention his wife, but offered an apology amid the public discontent due to the multiple controversies surrounding f

KT&G, the nation’s largest tobacco company, said Thursday its cigarette sales hit a new record in the third quarter, largely buoyed by overseas sales. In the July-September period, the company reported 1.04 trillion won ($780 million) in cigarette sales, up 7.7 percent from a year ago and the highest-ever quarterly figure. Operating profit in cigarette sales also soared 23.6 percent to 333 billion won. Overseas sales made up about one-third of its total cigarette sales, worth 419.7 bil

A group of South Koreans held a campaign denouncing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in front of the North’s permanent mission to the United Nations in Geneva on Wednesday, one of its organizers said Thursday. The campaign, organized jointly by the South Korean civic group People for Successful Corean Reunification and the Seoul-based advertising agency Jeski Social Campaign, was initiated at the plaza in front of the United Nations Office building where a session of the UN Human Rights Cou