North Korea lambasted South Korea Monday for its latest claim of the communist country's hacking attempts, denouncing the accusation as a plot to stir up anti-Pyongyang sentiment, Seoul's Yonhap News Agency reported. The National Intelligence Service (NIS), the South Korean spy agency, said in a parliamentary report last week that North Korea had attempted to hack into South Koreans' smartphones by spreading malicious applications online, possibly infecting more than 20,000 phones from May to September. "The claim was made to counter rising indignation among South Korean citizens over Seoul's destruction of the recent conciliatory mode between the two rival Koreas", said North Korea's key propaganda website Uriminjokkiri, which was monitored by Yonhap.
"It is not accidental that some local and overseas media accused (Seoul) of fabricating the hacking attempts in order to defend (Seoul's) crime of destroying the fence-mending mood and to arouse anti-North Korea sentiment", the website said. The South Korean government has customarily resorted to anti-Pyongyang sentiment whenever it was faced with a big political crisis, the propaganda website claimed, adding that NIS has always been in the forefront of such plots. The NIS accusation also "aims to cover up the South Korean government's anti-human crimes against local progressive groups including wiretapping and hacking", it also noted. North Korea has previously launched several hacking attempts in cyber warfare against Seoul on South Korean government websites and other personal PCs.