South Korean military officials reported on June 16th that the country's network of military computers were being hacked into more and more, with an average of 95,000 such attacks taking place each day. Breaking this figure down, South Korea's Defence Security Command reported that almost 10,500 hacking attempts were being made on a daily basis, alongside nearly 82,000 viruses - a 20 per cent increase over last year.

While acknowledging that about 90 per cent of these were comparable to the cyber attacks experienced by regular, home PC users, a Defence Security Command spokesman added, however, that the minority were serious, data-acquisition attempts. "Eleven percent of the total are sophisticated and vicious attempts to hack into military servers and to gather intelligence", the spokesman explained, in comments made to news agency AFP.

Military Hacking

No information was provided by the Defence Security Command as regards the origin of the military hacking. Previous, similar incidents, however, have been linked to China and North Korea, where South Korean officials believe highly-trained military hacker organisations are in operation.

In comments printed by national news organisation Yonhap, National Intelligence Service representative Yoo Ho-Jin highlighted the gravity of the situation.

"Our country continues to be vulnerable", Yoo was quoted as having said.

"Some of our government branches failed to function when we recently simulated a cyber-attack on them. This is a grave threat to our national security."

US Cyber Command

In related news, the US military is now close to establishing a new division to react to cyber attacks made on its computer network. To be known as US Cyber Command, the organisation will defend against what William Lynn, US deputy defense secretary, referred to as a wholly contemporary threat. "This is not an emerging threat", he said. "This is not some future threat. The cyber threat is here today. It is here now."

According to Lynn - speaking to the Voice of America - the US Defense Department's computer network was made up of no less than seven million individual computers, with over three million log-ins carried out on a daily basis. With this in mind, he added, the department's 15,000 networks represented a "tempting target" for potential cyber attackers.

"There is simply no exaggerating our military dependency on our information networks", Lynn asserted. "The command and control of our forces, the intelligence and logistics upon which they depend, the weapons technologies we develop and field, they all depend on our computer systems and networks. Indeed, our 21st century military simply cannot function without them."

On this bases, he added, the US military put cyberspace on the same level of importance as airspace and other areas of operations.