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South Korea’s Spy Agency Joins NATO’s Cyber Defense Unit

On Thursday, South Korea’s spy agency became the first in Asia to join NATO’s Cyber Defense Group in a move that risks inflaming tensions with regional superpower China.

In a statement, South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) said it had been admitted as a contributing participant for NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), a cyber defense hub established in May 2008 in Tallinn, Estonia, focused on research, training, and exercises in the field of cybersecurity.

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“Cyberthreats are causing great damage to not only individuals but also separate nations and also transnationally, so close international cooperation is crucial,” the NIS said.

Hu Xijin was the strident editor at Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece. The Global Times, tweetedThis was considered an insult to Beijing and laid the foundation for war in Asia. “If South Korea takes a path of turning hostile against its neighbors, the end of this path could be a Ukraine,” he wrote.

Against the background of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, South Korea’s admission to the group seems to reflect a hardening resolve among U.S. allies in response to mounting threats from, in principle, Moscow and Beijing, which has backed Vladimir Putin’s adventurism. On April 29, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry hailed ties with Russia as “a new model of international relations.”

However, whether NATO was motivated by events in Ukraine to finally sign off on South Korea’s membership is unclear. The NIS submitted its application to join the group in 2019 and has participated in the two most recent Locked Shields, the world’s largest international live-fire cyberdefense exercise. CCDCOE currently has five non-NATO contributors and 27 NATO members.

Prof. Sean O’Malley, a political scientist at Dongseo University in Busan, says South Korea’s membership is “a culmination of a very slow evolution over the past decade of getting cybersecurity to be recognized as a really serious threat.”

Despite hosting some of the world’s top tech companies, like LG and Samsung, South Korea has been a surprising laggard regarding cybercrime and only launched a National Cybersecurity Strategy under the Moon Jae-in administration in 2018.

Despite South Korea being the main target of cyberattacks across the DMZ, this is despite the fact that they are the most frequent targets. According to Seoul’s Korea Institute of Liberal Democracy, a crack team of 6,800 North Korean agents is involved in online fraud, blackmail, and gambling, which together bring in $860 million each year. Many of the attacks are from China.

And whether motivated by Beijing’s backing of Russia or not, the move does certainly bring U.S. allies closer together. “This is just one more arrow in the quiver for the United States and its allies,” says O’Malley. “And, of course, this is one more capacity where China would prefer South Korea be as independent as possible.”

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Send an email to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.

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