An aide to a lawmaker of the ruling party is suspected of being behind cyber attacks that crashed the computer systems of the National Election Commission and the liberal candidate for Seoul mayor on the day of the Oct. 26 by-election. The lawmaker, who denies involvement, says he would resign from his post if proven otherwise.

As he claims, Rep. Choi Koo-sik of the ruling Grand National Party may not be involved in the distributed denial-of-service, or DDoS, attacks, which shut down the websites of the election commission and the opposition candidate for more than two hours. In addition, Mayor Park Won-soon, who won the election nonetheless, says he does not believe Choi himself was involved in the case.

Yet, responsibility cannot be withheld from the lawmaker, who was the top public relations manager for the ruling party’s mayoral candidate. Instead, he will have to hold himself accountable for personnel mismanagement, if not for the cyber attack, if his aide is found guilty.

A low-level aide to Choi is alleged to have asked three employees of a Daegu-based information technology company to launch the attacks, which crashed the two websites for more than two hours on the morning of the by-election. The Cyber Force Center of the National Police Agency says more than 200 “zombie” computers were mobilized to generate heavy traffic and, by doing so, shut down the websites.

The DDoS attacks were apparently designed to discourage the opposition candidate’s supporters, most of them young, from going to the polls before reporting to work early in the morning by making it impossible for them to find their locations on the websites. Now the question is whether or not the aide took orders from Choi or someone else.

The main opposition Democratic Party claims a low-level aide alone cannot have masterminded the cyber attacks and that a powerful person must have been behind what it called “cyber terror,” but the ruling party insists no one else was involved. The fight is turning ugly as the rival parties are making unsubstantiated claims against the other.

But the rival parties will do well to disengage themselves from the acrimonious exchanges and wait until the law-enforcement agencies complete their investigations. In the meantime, they will have to work on how to protect themselves from similar attacks ahead of the next parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012.