Organized criminals were caught mounting cyber attacks on rivals to dominate online gambling, police officials said Sunday.
Describing the case as the first in which mobsters resorted to Internet hacking, police said two were indicted, one of whom was put in physical detention.
The culprits, belonging to a crime ring operating out of the port city of Incheon, hired hackers to attack more than 100 rival Internet gambling sites between November and December last year, police said. They used some 50,000 zombie computers purchased from China, according to the police.
One of the sites attacked unknowingly asked one of the culprits to block the attack, paying him 30 million won a month to lease a safer server, police said.
"The case shows that crime organizations are getting into cyber warfare," one official said. "We will persist in cracking down on cyber attackers to prevent a new kind of crime from spreading."