The National Intelligence Service recently announced that Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering, a global leader in submarine design and building, has been exposed to North Korean hacking attempts since late last year. It also said that the intranet of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute was exposed to the same hacking attack on June 14.

According to experts, the hacking attempts were made in order to steal South Korea’s nuclear submarine design and building techniques. At present, the company and the institute are capable of building a nuclear submarine if the former combines its submarine technologies with the latter’s small modular reactor technologies.

Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering has led the submarine development of South Korea. It signed South Korea’s first submarine export contract with the Ministry of Defense of Indonesia in 2011, when the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Germany were the only four submarine exporters in the world. Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering has designed and built most of South Korea’s submarines on its own.

North Korea, in fact, has made the same hacking attempts over and over. For example, it hacked Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and stole 60 pieces of confidential military data and 40,000 pieces of confidential corporate data in 2016, including those related to Aegis destroyers and 3,000-ton submarines.
Source: Business Korea