How can S. Korean military earn trust by covering up hacking"

The Dong-A Ilbo has reported that when the South Korean military’s cyber command intranet was hacked by suspected North Korean attackers, they accessed core intelligence such as military operation plans managed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the hacking of the Military Cyber Command intranet was confirmed, the Ministry of National Defense denied the possibility that such top secret documents were hacked because they were transmitted only through a separate network. It has turned out that the ministry’s explanation was a lie.

Some people in the military say that the hacked documents include provisional plans for large-scale South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises such as the Ulchi Freedom Guardian and special warfare plans against the North. Even though they are provisional plans, they are based on actual operational plans and are thus not too different from the real ones.

If the hacked operational plan is the OPCON 5015, a new South Korea-U.S. joint operational plan signed in June last year and applied to joint military exercises for the first time in March this year, the incident is extremely serious. OPCON 5015 is the highest-level of operational plan that includes measures against North Korea’s use of weapons of mass destruction and cyber, biological and chemical warfare. When the National Assembly’s National Defense Committee asked the Defense Ministry to brief on OPCON 5015, Defense Minister Han Min-koo refused to do so, saying that if the plan is revealed, it would have to be scrapped and replaced with a new one.

The military is mentioning the possibility that its personnel worked on the intranet with a thumb memory stick containing the operational plan plugged into a connected computer or stored the information on a computer on the network in violation of the security code. Since North Korea’s fifth nuclear test, Pyongyang had been bent on stealing the special operations plan targeting the North Korean leadership, including supreme leader Kim Jong Un. The South Korean military suffered the hacking because of its failure to abide by the most basic security rules, we cannot help worrying how we can trust the military’s ability to defense the nation.

It has turned out that the military tried to cover up the leakage of the operational plan after the joint investigation team consisting of personnel from the National Intelligence Service, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Security Command, the Criminal Investigation Command finished the investigation in late October. A strong military can exist on the basis of public trust before high-tech equipment or the troop size. The military trying to cover up the incident rather than admitting and apologizing for it cannot earn public trust.