GNP lawmaker’s aide admits cyber attack

No high-ranking official involved in DDoS attack on election watchdog: police


A former secretary to Grand National Party lawmaker Choi Ku-sik confessed Thursday to the cyber attack on the website of the national election watchdog on Oct. 26 during the by-elections.

According to the police, Gong confessed to the charges during an interrogation in the early hours of the day, saying he was acting independently.

Gong had up to that point denied involvement in the cyber attacks.

Police have tentatively concluded that no high-ranking officials of the ruling party orchestrated the massive cyber attack on the National Election Commission.

According to the National Police Agency, investigators failed to find evidence to link Kim, a former protocol officer for the National Assembly Speaker and GNP lawmaker Park Hee-tae, with the distributed denial-of-service incident that paralyzed the website’s bulletin on ballot place information. The investigators said no other “third party” is suspected of involvement in the crime.

The police last Thursday arrested Gong, a 27-year-old aide of GNP lawmaker Choi Ku-sik, and three employees of a local IT company for attacking the NEC server.

Gong reportedly asked the other three to hack into the site the day before the voting. The accomplices mobilized about 200 computers with a virus to breach the NEC firewall and deactivated the server with massive traffic for about two hours in the morning.

The “dead” website is claimed to have hindered younger voters from casting their ballots since many voting booths have been changed from the previous election. Younger voters are considered rather liberal and opposed to the conservative GNP. The NEC said it had received complaints that people gave up on voting because they could not gain access to information about the changed locations.

Gong told the police that he had plotted the crime to be helpful to GNP nominee Na Kyung-won, who lost against independent candidate Park Won-soon in the race for Seoul mayor.

The police found that Gong had dinner with Kim on the eve of the crime and had made five phone calls to Kim the next morning. Speculation rose that Kim or higher-level GNP insiders masterminded the attack, since DDoS is costly, far exceeding Gong’s salary.

However, an NPA insider said that after grilling Kim overnight, the officers could not find the link between him and the incident. He told the Yonhap news agency that the chances are slim that the GNP had plotted the attack, knowing that the possible backfire would be huge: Politicians could lose seats in the parliament and their political careers would be over, the source said.

Still, the investigators are open to the possibilities that Gong is covering for Kim, who has been seen as his mentor.

“We will make the investigation results public and will refer the case to the prosecution in the meantime,” an NPA official said.

Meanwhile, the interim report of the police invited criticism from opposition parties.

Rep. Kim Jin-pyo, floor leader of the Democratic Party, claimed that Gong has been framed.

“We have received information that Gong told one of his friends he ‘had to take responsibility for what I have not done.’ We urge the police to conduct thorough probe investigation,” he said.

Rep. Kang Gi-jung of the DP blamed the NEC and the National Intelligence Service for slack management of data and countermeasures against the cyber attack.

By Bae Ji-sook (baejisook@heraldcorp.com)