SEOUL, Jan. 11 (Xinhua) -- South Korean military plans to ban the use of USB flash drives starting as early as next year after it builds a new system to transfer data, local media reported Monday.

    The country's Ministry of Defense will put 2.8 billion won (2.5million U.S. dollars) into developing an alternative system to end the use of the portable storage device in transferring data, an unnamed ministry official was quoted as saying by Seoul's Yonhap News Agency.

    The move, believed to be a response to recent hacking incidents, comes at a time when South Korea is stepping up its efforts to stem cyber attacks, creating the first-ever cyber command to cope with a recent surge in cyber threats.

    Last November, a contingency war plan drawn up by South Korea and the United States in the event of an assumed invasion by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) was extracted from a portable storage device a military officer was using to transfer data to a wired computer.