South Korea’s financial industry was hit by a second wave of cyberattacks in about a month as a series of breaches across Asia heightens concerns that artificial intelligence (AI) is making large-scale hacking easier.
Financial Supervisory Service Governor Lee Chan-jin said on Oct 28 that some of South Korea’s major financial investment companies had suffered widespread hacking the previous day. He urged the industry to strengthen security, without identifying the affected companies.
Institutions including Mirae Asset Global Investments Co and Daishin Securities Co reported unauthorised access, renewing concerns over the vulnerability of the country’s financial system.
South Korea’s Presidential Blue House will hold an emergency meeting to discuss the hack, Yonhap News reported. The Blue House did not offer an immediate comment.
The breaches add to a string of attacks on Japanese companies, including SoftBank Corp and Daiwa Securities Group Inc, that have prompted authorities there to call for security checks. Japan’s Financial Services Agency called for scrutiny of third-party risks and extra precautions when verifying users’ identities online, while Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama urged financial institutions to review their defences.
Earlier this month, attackers using a sophisticated AI agent targeted some of South Korea’s biggest banks and financial institutions.
Organisations worldwide are also working to patch critical flaws in PHP, an open-source programming language widely used across the Internet, amid disruptions that have prompted banks, airlines and governments to take websites offline.
Daishin Securities said personal and credit information belonging to 38,490 customers was leaked. Mirae Asset Global, which had US$461bil (RM1.88 trillion) in assets under management at the end of September, reported unauthorised access to some of its business-use web systems.
Daishin said it detected suspicious access on Oct 17 to a server supporting remote account openings. An investigation found that exposed information included customer names, email and physical addresses, and encrypted account and mobile phone numbers. The brokerage said it found no evidence of subsequent harm to customers or unauthorised access to its core business systems.
Mirae Asset said retail investor information wasn’t involved because the affected systems don’t serve those customers. There were no financial losses and its main systems and servers were operating normally, the company said in a statement.
Cryptocurrency exchange Bithumb Co also detected unauthorised access to its internal mobile groupware system on Oct 27, according to Yonhap. It is investigating the extent of any data leak, including whether customer information was exposed, the report said. An email seeking comment wasn’t immediately answered. – Bloomberg
