Hacking of SK-US War Plan Under Investigation

The South Korea-U.S. Combined Force Command is investigating whether a hacker in China extracted details of a classified joint war plan to counter a North Korean attack.

A spokesman at the Defense Ministry in Seoul yesterday said the classified information was hacked after a field-grade officer of the command used an unsecured portable storage device to transfer the file on Operational Plan 5027 to a wired computer.

The spokesman said the hacked document was an 11-page slide presentation on a plan for the dispatch of nearly 700,000 U.S. troops to the Korean Peninsula if a full-fledged conflict broke out.

“The leaked document doesn’t contain things deemed top secret but are classified,” he said.

The South Korean military is said to have found other data hacked, but none was confidential.

A Seoul military official said the hacker used an Internet protocol based in China, adding, “While we have yet to confirm anything, we’re investigating the case and focusing on the possibility that a North Korean hacker unit was involved.”

In 2005, a non-commissioned South Korean officer had secret documents on the war plan stored in his personal PC notebook leaked while using an Internet file-sharing program.

ysh1005@donga.com