SOUTH KOREA. Lotte Duty Free’s main website was hacked today, the alleged victim of a Chinese backlash against Lotte Group’s involvement in the Korean deployment of US anti-missile system THAAD.
Parts of the site were still down at 16.45 local time after the noontime disruption, replaced by multi-lingual messages (see below), saying “the page you are looking for has been removed”.
However, normal service was resumed around 17.00.
LOTTE DUTY FREE STATEMENT – Lotte Internet Duty Free website access disability
UPDATE: Lotte Duty Free has just issued a statement (17.37 Korean time) as follows (text translated from Korean): “On March 2, at about 12 noon, customers had trouble with connection problems (Korean, Chinese, English, Japanese) on the four Korean homepages of Lotte Internet Duty Free.
The reason for the connection failure is estimated to be the DDoS [Distributed Denial of Service -Ed] attack using a Chinese IP. After about three hours of inaccessible state, after 3:00 pm, some IPs were excluded and the service was restored to enable normal use of the service.
“The first attack was detected at 8:00 pm on March 1st at the Chinese language PC site, and there was an additional DDoS attack on March 1st at 8:30 PM. It was restored in 30 minutes.
“At around 12 noon today, Lotte Internet Duty Free site was brought down due to a massive attack and it is estimated that the damage reached hundreds of millions of Korean Won.
“Lotte Duty Free will restore the Internet duty free shop service after 6 pm through additional measures such as strengthening the security system.”
BACKGROUND
On Monday, Lotte Duty Free parent company Lotte Group formally signed a land-swap deal with South Korea’s military that will see the deployment of the US anti-missile system THAAD (full name Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) go ahead as planned later this year.
Lotte Group confirmed the deal to The Moodie Davitt Report. As we noted, Lotte’s decision risked a further strong backlash from China which could have a dramatic impact on visitor numbers to Korea and duty free sales.
Chinese state media China.org let rip a furious blast at the decision on Tuesday, commenting: “The decision could turn into a nightmare for Lotte, which depends heavily on Chinese tourists to South Korea for revenue from duty free stores.”
It appears that nightmare has begun.
