13,000 Government Service Personal Data Leaked... "Be Careful with Auto-Saving Passwords"

NIS Detects Signs of Illegal Personal Data Distribution

It has been revealed that personal information of over 13,000 users of government services from national and public institutions was illegally leaked. The National Intelligence Service (NIS) urged caution, warning that using the feature to automatically save IDs and passwords in web browsers can lead to personal information being compromised.

The NIS recently detected signs that an unidentified hacker group is illegally distributing personal information of users of government services from national and public institutions through the dark web and Telegram, and issued a warning on the 5th.

The accounts for public services infected with malware and leaked on the dark web number over 13,000. The NIS provided the relevant institutions with this information to ensure that additional damage is prevented at the institutional level.

According to the NIS, hackers used a malicious "information-stealing" malware called Infostealer to steal personal information such as IDs and passwords.

This involves distributing illegal software that conceals Infostealer on P2P (peer-to-peer) sites or blogs where various unspecified content and files are exchanged, such as web hard drives.

If the stolen personal information is illegally distributed and falls into the hands of other hackers, greater damage such as ransom demands through ransomware attacks may occur.

The NIS emphasized the need to be cautious when using the widely used automatic ID and password saving feature. If a user of this feature is infected with Infostealer, login information such as IDs and passwords saved in the web browser can be stolen.

An NIS official stated, "To prevent hacking damage, refrain from using the automatic ID and password saving feature, and never install suspicious software."

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