[Editorial] Guard against N. Korea

The South Korean government is providing protection for Minister of National Defense Kim Kwan-jin on intelligence that North Korean agents are on a mission to assassinate him. When he is on the move, he is escorted by a military police detail dressed in civilian clothes.

The assassination plan, if true, is another surreptitious act of provocation against South Korea. As such, it must be dealt with accordingly.

South Korea cannot take too many precautions for the defense minister’s personal safety, given the long history of North Korean terrorism. The terrorist attacks range from the bombing of a civilian airliner to a bomb attack on a South Korean presidential entourage in Burma.

Moreover, North Korea said earlier that the defense minister and other “military thugs” must be immediately executed for the “awful crime of damaging the dignity” of the communist state. It has since been intensifying its verbal attack on the defense minister.

A South Korean security official is quoted as saying that a team of agents with a mission to assassinate the defense minister is operating here on instructions from North Korea. He added, however, that it is yet to be confirmed whether they are agents directly dispatched from the North, hired hands from abroad or spies residing in the nation.

Allegedly behind the operation is North Korea’s General Bureau of Reconnaissance, which reportedly orchestrates acts of hostility against the South. In January and February last year, the agency allegedly sent two army majors to South Korea, posing as defectors. They made an abortive attempt to kill Hwang Jang-yop, the now-deceased former chairman of North Korea’s legislature, the Supreme People’s Assembly, who had defected to the South in 1997. The agents were arrested in April 2010.

The North Korean threat to the defense minister’s safety dates back to last December, when his confirmation hearing was held at the National Assembly. In his testimony, Kim promised to send jet fighters for a counterattack should North Korea provoke the South again after the sinking of a South Korean corvette and the shelling of a South Korean island in the sea off North Korea’s west coast earlier in the year ― the latest unprovoked acts of hostility for which South Korea believes the General Bureau of Reconnaissance was responsible.

It may not be the defense minister alone that needs protection against North Korea’s personal safety threat. It is high time that the government seriously considered providing all other Cabinet members and other people in high public posts with security guards. True, North Korea publicly targeted the defense minister alone for an “execution.” But it does not mean that he is the only target.

Undoubtedly exposed to such a threat are South Korean politicians, scholars and others that have been vocal in their criticism of Kim Jong-il, taking issue with deteriorating human rights in North Korea. So are North Koreans who held high positions before defecting to the South. A reminder in this regard is the assassination in 1997 of someone related to Kim Jong-il’s deceased wife.

South Korea also needs to guard itself against another type of terrorism ― cyber attacks that may prove to be no less damaging than physical ones. Both governmental and civilian computer networks were disabled or slowed down when they were recently under an attack suspected of originating in North Korea.

Protection against cyber terrorism is rudimentary at best, as witnessed during recent attacks. The computer network of a commercial bank was shut down when it was targeted for a “distributed denial-of-service” attack, better known as a DDoS attack, allegedly of North Korean origin in March this year. Some other financial institutions and government agencies sustained less serious damage.

Damage of such scale was done even though the South Korean government had been taking what it regarded as utmost precaution under its “comprehensive plan against cyber crises in the nation.” In other words, the precaution proved to be inadequate.

South Korea needs to frequently update protection against cyber attacks, as it did under its “master plan for cyber security” on Tuesday. As it said, cyber space is the fourth area of national defense after land, airspace and territorial waters.