Hacking attack on South Korea traced to Chinese address, officials say

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- The suspected cyberattack targeting South Korean banks and broadcasters originated from an IP address in China, South Korean regulators said Thursday, heightening suspicions of North Korean involvement.

The attack Wednesday damaged 32,000 computers and servers at media and financial companies, South Korea's Communications Commission said.

It infected banks' and broadcasters' computer networks with a malicious program, or malware, that slowed or shut down systems, officials and the semiofficial Yonhap News Agency said.

Suspicion immediately fell on North Korea, which has recently renewed threats to go to war with the South amid rising tensions over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons, and missile testing and international efforts to stop them.

Some past cyberattacks on South Korean organizations that officials linked to North Korea were traced to IP addresses in China. An IP address is the number that identifies a network or device on the Internet.

Experiencing a potential cyberattack

Cybersecurity concerns for China, U.S.

China, which has been accused by U.S. organizations of supporting cyberattacks, said Thursday that it was aware of reports on the matter.

"We have pointed out many times that hacking is a global issue. It is anonymous and transnational," said Hong Lei, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman. "Hackers would often use IP addresses from other countries to launch cyberattacks."

South Korean officials are still analyzing the cause of the network crashes and are working to prevent any further damage, the country's communications commission said.

Increased alert level

The military has stepped up its cyberdefense efforts in response to the widespread outages, which hit nine companies, Yonhap reported, citing the National Police Agency.

Government computer networks did not seem to be affected, Yonhap cited the National Computing and Information Agency as saying.

A joint team from government, the military and private industry was responding.

A South Korean official close to the investigation told CNN that malicious computer code spread through hacking caused the outages.

How the hackers got in and spread the code remains under investigation, and analysts are examining the malware, the official said.