Seoul plans to expand the scope of its cyber security efforts and recruit more security staff following recent denial-of-service attacks on government and financial institutions.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government’s u-Total Security Center will grow to include its data center in an effort to stay ahead of increasingly professional and intelligent cyber threats, officials said Tuesday.

The data center is to recruit more security analysts and maintain neutral assistance with the existing cyber task force, u-Total Security Center, to increase response time to threats.

“We need more systematic and proactive precautionary measures in order to counter ever more intelligent and diverse cyber threats,” said a city official.

“With the integrated security center we will unify and actively handle the changing information security environment,” he said.

Once the system is established, the ability to monitor security threats 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, will be available in one location.

The DDoS attack last Friday and Saturday included a number of governmental organizations and major firms. Among them were the Defense Ministry, Unification Ministry, the National Assembly, the U.S. Forces in Korea, the Korea Communications Commission and the military headquarters. The two biggest Internet portals ― Naver and Daum ― as well as major commercial banks such as Kookmin, Woori and Shinhan were on the list.

The DDoS attack was similar to the cyber attack that targeted 17 local websites during July 7-9, 2009. It launched malicious codes that caused personal computers to bombard sites without users’ consent.

By Robert Lee (rjmlee@heraldcorp.com)