40s Suspected of Cyber Network Hacking Attempt... 61GB External Hard Drive Full of Personal Information Found in Seizure

Hana Bank Network Malware Planting Attempted Last Year
Hacker Arrested
Two External Hard Drives Found by Police Contain
Card Numbers, Passwords, Resident Registration Numbers, etc.

Cooperation Issues Between Police and Financial Supervisory Service
Police Chief Urges "Prompt Collaboration for Recovery"

[Asia Economy Reporter Lee Gwan-ju] Two external hard drives containing credit and debit card information were discovered among the seized items from a suspect arrested last year for attempting to hack a commercial bank's computer network, prompting police to launch an investigation. The two external hard drives, totaling 1.5 terabytes (TB), were found to contain 61GB of credit card information. Police believe this case is similar in scale to last year's incident involving the leakage of 570,000 personal information records from 15 financial companies.

According to the police on the 15th, the Security Investigation Unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency obtained four external hard drives during the investigation of additional crimes committed by Mr. Lee (42), who attempted to implant malware to hack Hana Bank's computer network in June last year. Among these, two external hard drives with a capacity of 1.5TB contained 61GB of credit card information. Some of the credit card information included card numbers, resident registration numbers, and credit card PINs. However, the names of the credit card users were not found, according to the police. It was confirmed that Mr. Lee had a prior conviction in 2014 for hacking point-of-sale (POS) terminals at card merchants and stealing large amounts of credit card information. Therefore, it is presumed that the personal information found on the external hard drives was also obtained through hacking by Mr. Lee.

Typically, personal information leaked through hacking is stored in 'DB' format. This means organizing personal data such as user IDs, nicknames, banks and account numbers, names, and phone numbers of users of a specific site into an Excel sheet. The amount of data per individual in such organized personal information is not large. In fact, personal information illegally traded on the dark web, deep web, and social network services (SNS) usually amounts to about 1MB per DB file. Simply put, 1.5TB could hold 1.5 million DB files, and considering each DB file contains information on about 10,000 individuals, this equates to approximately 610,000 personal information records. A police official stated, "We are confirming the scale of the personal information leakage," adding, "It is believed to be on par with last year's incident involving 570,000 leaked records."

The police are also investigating what Mr. Lee intended to do with this personal information. Since there are limitations to committing financial crimes using personal information alone, it is suspected that he intended to resell it. On the dark web and other platforms, personal information is sold for about 20 to 25 Korean won per record.

Meanwhile, analyzing the personal information data secured by the police is taking time due to a lack of smooth cooperation between the police and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS). A police official said, "We requested data analysis from the FSS, but cooperation has not been forthcoming." On the other hand, the FSS responded, "There is no regulatory basis for the FSS to investigate or analyze materials containing large amounts of personal information," and added, "It was difficult to cooperate because we were asked to do something beyond our authority."

Regarding this, Police Commissioner Min Gap-ryong said at a press conference that "Although the main suspect has been arrested and the investigation is concluded, measures for recovery require notifying the affected parties about the personal information leakage. Since this involves financial information, cooperation from the FSS is necessary during the classification process." He emphasized, "During the consultation process, there have been misunderstandings due to the vast amount of data, but the local police and the police agency must work together quickly to resolve this." He added, "I have urged the activation of a collaborative system to solve this issue."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.