South Korean courts suffer website outages in suspected cyber attacks

The websites of South Korean courts temporarily went down Thursday afternoon, a day after South Korean military websites suffered similar outages.

The court websites, including that of the country’s largest Seoul central district court, were inaccessible due to suspected cyberattacks.

The court administration office told reporters it suspects a distributed denial of service attack, in which servers are overwhelmed with large amounts of traffic to block access, by a potential foreign source.

The Cyber Operations Command, which is investigating Wednesday's military website outages, told the National Assembly last week cyber attacks from North Korea against the South Korean military and affiliated institutions have increased in recent years.

North Korean hackers could now be aided by Russia amid the two countries’ growing military cooperation in the Ukraine war, the Cyber Operations Command warned.