At Dawn, "Hey! Take Your Self-Diagnosis" Alert... Self-Diagnosis App Breached by External Attack

Suspicious Alerts Sent from Self-Diagnosis App Early Morning on 14th
Additional Attacks from 3 IPs Following Initial Attack from 5 IPs
Ministry of Education Currently Blocking Access from These IPs

[Asia Economy Reporter Han Jinju] The 'Health Status Self-Diagnosis' application used by students was subjected to an external attack, causing notifications to be sent out during the early morning hours.

According to the Ministry of Education on the 19th, on the early morning of the 14th, notifications such as "Everyone, please do your self-diagnosis!! Can't you see the number of confirmed cases increasing?", "The security of the self-diagnosis app is too weak", and "Let's get into the self-diagnosis" were sent from the self-diagnosis app.

A Ministry of Education official stated at a regular briefing with the press corps, "Basic information about app users was collected from school websites or other sites, and the app was attacked by inputting multiple passwords." Currently, the Education Cyber Safety Center is responsible for managing the security of the self-diagnosis app.

According to the Ministry of Education, the attacker accessed the self-diagnosis app system from five IP addresses, and it was identified that about ten user authentication values were used during the attack process. Subsequently, similar attacks were attempted from three other IP addresses, all of which have been blocked.

The Ministry of Education official explained, "Previously, if a password was entered incorrectly five times, another attempt could be made within five minutes; this has been changed so that after three failed attempts, the next try can only be made after 60 minutes. We are continuously blocking IPs involved in password attacks."

They are also considering adding systems such as 'CAPTCHA' to block macro attacks on the self-diagnosis app. The Ministry of Education official added, "We have strengthened security measures such as encryption during login and data exchange processes, and if authentication values have been compromised, we plan to complete improvements soon to neutralize that as well. We are looking for ways to maintain the convenience of quick self-diagnosis before school while blocking macros and similar attacks."

Regarding whether to request an investigation in the future, the Ministry of Education official said, "So far, we are focusing on responding to the issue and will consider further follow-up measures."

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