SEOUL, April 15 (Yonhap) -- North Korea was behind a massive distribution of phishing emails to South Koreans between late last year and early this year, the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) said Tuesday.
The agency said a North Korean hacking group sent 126,266 fake emails to 17,744 people in South Korea from last November to January to steal their personal information.
The scam emails are classified into about 30 types, falsely promising to provide information on North Korean politics, concert tickets for famous singers, tax refunds, daily fortunes and health, the KNPA said.
Notably, one type of email falsely promised to reveal the Defense Counterintelligence Command's documents on former President Yoon Suk Yeol's Dec. 3 martial law declaration and was sent to 54 online users in the South, the agency noted.
The scam emails, if clicked, would direct the users to phishing sites that ask for their portal site account ID and password.
The KNPA said that the same servers used in previous cyberattacks originating from North Korea were used again this time and IP addresses used were located in areas between North Korea and China's Liaoning Province.
Email recipients included government officials, researchers and journalists in the fields of unification, security, national defense and diplomacy and 120 of them had their portal site account information, email addresses and contact information stolen after accessing the phishing sites, the agency said.
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