Private Information Leak Must Not Continue

2014-03-10     Observer
Recently, many shameful things have occurred with regards to information leakage and security problems. The biggest example is the KCB Credit Rating Agency employee who leaked personal information of customers. Also, the world-famous Facebook was accused of monitoring personal information of its members. Like this, information leakage and security problems have resurfaced on the internet service. In this article, The Observer searched these problems, reasons and solutions.Recently there was a big accident about leaking personal information of credit card clients. One KCB Credit Rating Agency official has leaked personal information from tmajor card companies (Kookmin, Lotte, Nonghyup) and delivered information to loan adperson and mortgage outsourcing. Another example is that Facebook which monitored private messages for its benefit.Let’s look at the officials’ actions concerning these personal information leakages. These credit card companies decided to offer message service for free for a certain time. Facebook was sued for monitoring private messages but they showed their defensive stance about the suit.


Representative examples about information leakage
In the introduction, we listed recent examples of personal information leakage. Let’s examine it in detailand give other examples. First, as you read above, a KCB Credit Rating Agencyofficial has leaked personal information of credit card clients of various banks. KB Kookmin card leaked about 53 million cases, Lotte card leaked about 26 million cases, and NH Nonghyup card leaked about 25 million cases. The number of damaged clients was about 20 million cases except for some overlapping clients. President Park Geun Hye and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon were also been known to be victims.Second, Samsung card business team official hacked into a Samsung card company server and searched for 1.92 millions clients’ information. While searching the information 196 times, 470,000 cases of personal information were leaked. There were loan credit and maturity breakdowns, names, company names, telephone numbers, resident registration numbers, addresses, card numbers, cash service approve breakdowns, and card loan records that were revealed.Third, the portal site Nate was hacked as well and consequently, 35 million Nate member IDs, passwords, names, resident registration numbers, and phone numbers were leaked from the data base.


Information leakage from SNS
Social network service ‘Twitter’ was hacked as well. For example, the singer Mr. L was hacked. Through Mr. L’s twitter account, women’s nude pictures were uploaded. Also the singer Ms. L’s personal information was leaked and uploaded online. It seems that the hacker took a picture of her college information and uploaded it.In the case of Kakao talk, there is a recommended friends menu list which connects you to many strangers. If you add them to your friends in curiosity, it will open a URL chatting room. If you click on the chat room, your cellular phone can be hacked including your finance service trade history and other personal information. As a result, cash in linked accounts can be withdrawn instantly before you know it.Six million people’s personal information was hacked through Facebook. In the setting menu, there is “my information downloads” function which saves posting records in Facebook. When you download your personal information, other users’ information can be downloaded as well. In addition, there were accusations that Facebook monitored private messages of its members. Facebook benefits from analyzing the text messages of people using it and therefore created suspicions.


The damage of information leakage
Information leakage can result to frauds like small sum payments scam. This scam automatically makes accounts that can withdraw payments from 1,000 up to 10,000 won. The payment is considered small so a lot of people tend to think that this is not big problem. Therefore, the number of victims has been increasing. Second, there is a combination of voice phishing and smishing. This is a new method of cybercrime. This new modus operandi tries to impersonate the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA). People who do this crime call and tell their victims that they have been hacked and inform them that they are willing to install an application that can block it because the phone was infected with a virus. They will then send a link message to their victims for them to download. However, the link is a fake. If they click on the link in the message, malignant applications are installed in the phone. As a result, more casualties are possible to occur like micropayments and bank fraud.Here is one example related to smishing message: “[Woori bank] Your personal information seems to be leaked. Please, upgrade your security level. -www. woor*****.com-.” Once you click on it, your information will be leaked for real.


Causes of information leakage
There are two causes of information leakage. First is lack of personal vigilance. Many people have poor awareness about their personal information security. Also, their security is already vulnerable in the first place because many people tend to post their personal information in their individual homepage or web. Moreover, the people or officials whose responsible of protecting customers’ security information lack the social and moral responsibilities towards their stakeholders. Social negligence is another cause of information leakage. Even though Korea has a big IT industry, its security management systems are not good. The government did not take a positive attitude for the development of white hacker who can counteract black hacker. Additionally, crisis management ability is too weak after the accident occurred.


The solution plan and policy which reduce the damage from information leakage
The Financial Services Commission offered a variety of measures to prevent information leakage such as total improvement related to practices concerningprivate information disclosure, deletion of private information after closing customers’ card, introduction of punitive levy system on financial leaking private information, and reinforcement of criminal penalties about authority who let the information leak as national policies of the government.For example, some credit card companies provide text message alert services for free for all users for a certain period of time. Furthermore, they make banners for termination as well as reissuance of a card that can be use on their homepage.There are also precautionary ways you can do personally. Periodically check your transactional information or other private information in order to prevent cyber terror. Checking your account regularly can protect you from hacking problems or prevent getting more serious problems if in case your account is already compromised. Refrain from using public computers when logging on to finance-related sites or join sites that are unfamiliar to you. Lastly, you should be careful of posting your contact number or private information on sites which lots of people are able to visit such as private homepage or personal blog.


Have you ever thought about your personal information being leaked while you were sleeping? As you have read, there are various examples of information leakage and these can occur regardless of time and place. The government, companies and individuals need to be aware about information leakage and the damages it can create to people. And in order to prevent this problem to occur, we should not write our personal information on SNS and join untrusted sites just because of some promos or event offerings. If we do, we are directly making ourselves vulnerable to scams.