S Korean military to ban USB flash drives

The South Korean military plans to phase out the use of USB flash drives in an attempt to put a stop to increasing cyber attacks.

The move comes after part of a South Korea-US operational plan was accessed by a hacker through a USB thumb drive used by an officer at the Combined Forces Command. It also comes after the Ministry of National Defense (MND) launched a cyber warfare command on Jan. 11.

"We plan to spend 2.8 billion won [$2.5 million] this year in establishing a new data exchange system to replace USB drives," a unnamed military spokesman said, according to the Defense News.

"Once the system is set up, the use of thumb drives will be banned thoroughly."

The new data transfer server, which will link the MND, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the headquarters of the Army, Navy and Air Force, will allow exchange of data between the Intranet and Internet in a safe and secure manner, he said.

The spokesman went on to add that currently, data transfer between the Intranet and Internet is blocked for security issues, so military officials here often use USB drives for data exchange.

The Defense Security Command said last year that on average it faced about 95,000 hacking attacks against military networks in a single day.

In July, the South Korean government and industrial computer networks suffered from massive cyber attacks for several days. North Korean hackers were blamed for the attacks, according to South Korean and US intelligence sources.

Source: PressTV.
Link: http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=116260§ionid=351020405.