South Korea has suffered another wave of attacks that have compromised social networking sites, Nate and Cyworld, both run by SK Communications. The attacks are blamed largely on Chinese hackers, who are thought to have made off credentials for over 35 million accounts. Korean Communications Commission claims to have tracked the IPs back to China. Names, email addresses, phone numbers and resident registration numbers of users are believed to be exposed by hackers.

South Korea has suffered a series of cyber-attacks in recent months focused mainly on government and financial firms. In April the government supported bank, Nonghyup, was targeted and a month later about 1.8 million customer’s data was stolen from Hyundai Capital, the group owned by Hyundai Motor and GE Capital International. More recently the country’s military HQ and networks of US Forces based in Korea, the National Assembly and Government ministries were also targeted.

The attack is believed to be a large one, considering South Korea’s population is about 48 million. But it is still less than half of that when hackers hit Sony’s music and video on-demand service and PlayStation network that resulted in the compromise of more than 100 million accounts.

“By any standard this is a massive attack and one of many in recent months where the finger has been pointed at hackers based in China. It’s too early to say whether this attack is politically motivated or merely an attempt to steal personal information for financial gain,” commented Mark Darvill, director at security appliance firm AEP Networks.

China is in the center stage in recent months as more hacking incidents have mounted from there. Allegations have risen against China as hackers from here intruded into the network of Lockheed Martin, US military contractor and Google e-mail accounts of U.S. officials and Chinese human rights advocates. New York Times later published a report of a link to China in the Trojan software used to attack Google.

The hacker group, LulzSec have been making the rounds of news in recent time hacking hardcore porn websites, video-game industry websites, Nintendo and releasing over 12,000 e-mail addresses and passwords from Writerspace.com.

All the recent attacks expose the vulnerabilities of networks all over the world. It now becomes difficult to differentiate between attacks on military, social, communications, financial, civilian, and critical infrastructure as hackers are targeting all of the above.