A hacker suspected of orchestrating a cyberattack on a major South Korean securities firm has been indicted on charges of disrupting the company's computer network, prosecutors said Wednesday.
  

The Seoul Central District Prosecutor's Office said the 38-year-old man, identified only by his surname Noh, is suspected to have launched a distributed denial-of-service attack that overwhelmed the website of Mirae Asset Securities Co., causing its services to be unavailable for 30 minutes on March 21, 2008.
  

Noh demanded 50 million won ($41,500) in exchange for stopping the attack but did not succeed in extorting the money, prosecutors said.
  

He is also suspected of extorting some 4.5 million won from other small and medium-sized businesses by launching similar cyberattacks.
  

Noh has lived in Brazil since 2010 after fleeing South Korea to escape investigation until he surrendered himself to police last month, prosecutors said.
  

A DDoS attack most often involves flooding Web sites with large amounts of data, rendering targeted servers unusable by obstructing their communication with users' computers. The attacks generally involve multiple personal computers infected by a virus, allowing individual hackers to drive more traffic to the targeted site. (Yonhap)