London, Feb. 22 (ANI): South Korea is reportedly working on cyber attack weapons in a bid to damage North Korean nuclear facilities.
The weapons would be similar to Stuxnet, the software designed to attack Iranian nuclear enrichment plants.
According to the BBC, the country's defence ministry said that the South Korean military would carry out missions using the software.
The announcement has alarmed security experts who have said that using cyberweapons could be "very dangerous".
The report said that the development of the cyber attack weapons is a part of a two-phase strategy that began in 2010, in which the aim is to initially conduct online propaganda operations by posting to North Korean social networking and social media services.
A senior ministry official said that once the second phase is established, the cybercommand would carry out comprehensive cyberwarfare missions.
Meanwhile, a computer security expert at the University of Surrey, Prof. Alan Woodward said that attempting to use cyberweapons to physically damage critical infrastructure could drastically backfire.
Woodward pointed that once Stuxnet was released, its spread was impossible to predict or control because the code intended for Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities attacked Siemens control systems, including electrical generation plants, factories and water treatment works.
He further said that malicious code such as Stuxnet does not respect national boundaries and the cyber-attack code developed by South Korea could rebound and end up damaging South Korean infrastructure that uses the same technologies, the report added. (ANI)
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