Hackers Attack South Korea Government Web Site

South Korea said Thursday that a government Web site was the target of a hacking attack from computers in China and began an inquiry into the incident.

The four-hour attack Wednesday night was directed from about 120 Internet servers from China, the Ministry of Public Administration and Security said.

Widespread damage was avoided, but traffic on the Web site that contains information on government policy and services was severely slowed down, the ministry said.

The cyberraid was a so-called distributed denial of service attack, in which a large number of computers bombard a Web site with queries to overload and crash it.

The attacks came at a time when South Korea is worried about cyberattacks from North Korea in the wake of an international investigation that found a North Korean torpedo had sunk a South Korean warship in March. Seoul, which filed a complaint against its neighbor over the sinking with the UN Security Council, blamed Pyongyang for the attack, but North Korea denied involvement.

In July, days of hacking attacks brought government Web sites in South Korea and the United States to a standstill. South Korea's intelligence chief accused North Korea of carrying out those attacks from servers in China.