Last week South Korea and the United States experienced near simultaneous cyber attacks that crippled some of the most high profile portals, financial institutions and government agencies’ websites. At that moment, the attacks seemed to be aimed at crippling the infrastructure and were believed not be aimed at stealing information.

Today, South Korean police officials announced that the hackers extracted couple if files from the websites that were intruded and infected them with a virus, that eventually led to a string of breakdown in prominent websites. The virus was designed to instruct multiple computers to visit a website all at the same time, which overloaded the servers and led to the blackout of those websites.

During the investigation, it has been ascertained that such type of an attack wasn’t only aimed at disruption, but might also have been used for stealing information. Experts believe that, these attacks could have also infected these computers to the extent, that they would intentionally corrupt or damage their hard disks and files.

According to An Chan-Soo (Senior police Officer),

“Police reached those conclusions after studying a malicious computer code in an analysis of about two dozen computers – a sample of the tens of thousands of computers that were infected with the virus that triggered the attacks. It’s like hackers taking a look inside the computers. We’re trying to figure out why they did this.”

As per the information, the hackers were able to extract files and send then to 419 computers across 59 countries, out of which 15 of those computers were found to be in South Korea. South Korean intelligence agency, the National Intelligence Service has been suspecting the hand of North Korea in these attacks. The agency informed the lawmakers in South Korea, that according to intelligence sources, Pyongyang had ordered one of its military research institutes to decimate South Korea’s communications network.

Via Associated Press.