SEOUL: South Korea’s intelligence agency foiled North Korean attempts to hack into South Korean companies developing coronavirus vaccines, lawmakers said on Friday.
Ha Tae-keung, a member of the parliamentary intelligence committee, said after being briefed by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) that the agency did not specify how many and which drugmakers were targeted but said there was no damage from the hacking attempts.
The revelation came after Microsoft said early this month that hackers working for the Russian and North Korean governments have tried to break into the networks of seven pharmaceutical companies and vaccine researchers in Canada, France, India, South Korea and the United States.
The closed-door briefings by the NIS, which shares intelligence and analysis with counterparts among key neighbours, provide rare public access to information about the reclusive North.
Ha and another member Kim Byung-kee said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had taken some “unreasonable” actions due to COVID-19 “paranoia.”
They said those actions included banning fishing and salt production because of fears that seawater might have been contaminated with the virus, and stranding some 110,000 tonnes of rice from China in the northeastern Chinese port of Dalian. “He has been expressing emotional excess, anger and signs of stress, and increasingly giving unreasonable orders,” Ha told reporters. North Korea has not confirmed any coronavirus infection, but the NIS had said an outbreak there cannot be ruled out as the country had active trade and people-to-people exchanges with China before closing the border in late January.
Pyongyang has not issued any official response to the recent US presidential election, but the government has urged all its overseas diplomatic missions to exercise caution and not “provoke” the United States, lawmaker Kim said.
Meanwhile, asymptomatic COVID-19 patients are driving a surge in new cases in South Korea, frustrating efforts to control transmission by the Asian country which managed to keep infections under control in previous outbreaks.
South Korea reported 569 new cases in the 24 hours ending Thursday midnight, a level unseen in nearly nine months, as it grapples with the third wave of the pandemic that appears to be worsening despite tough new social distancing measures.
With young people at the centre of the surge, health authorities in South Korea estimate asymptomatic patients now account for 40 per cent of total infections, up sharply from 20-30 per cent in June.
That compares with research evidence suggesting about one in five infected people in general will experience no symptoms.
The rate is much lower in China where the state disease control centre said in February that around 1 per cent of more than 70,000 cases it analysed were asymptomatic. In Tokyo, about 19 per cent of patients are asymptomatic. — Reuters
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