163 IT Incidents at Internet Banks in 5 Years... Accidents Continue Despite Increased Operations Spending

Over the past five years, a total of 163 IT-related incidents have occurred at the three major internet banks—KakaoBank, K-Bank, and Toss Bank. Although investments in IT operations have been increasing each year, critics point out that both accident prevention and post-incident monitoring systems remain insufficient.

According to materials submitted to Assemblyman Lee Yangsoo of the National Assembly's Political Affairs Committee by KakaoBank, K-Bank, and Toss Bank on March 20, the number of IT incidents at the three banks totaled 163 between 2021 and February of this year, spanning roughly five years.

By bank, both Toss Bank and KakaoBank reported the highest number, with 64 incidents each, while K-Bank had 35 incidents. Among these, Toss Bank recorded the largest financial losses. Toss Bank had 10,700 victims, with compensation payments totaling 48.74 million won—the highest among the three banks.

K-Bank paid a total of 210,000 won to 107 individuals, while KakaoBank compensated 69,687 users with a total amount of 1.94 million won. In the case of KakaoBank, on March 17, a service outage made it impossible to access the mobile app for 34 minutes during two separate periods in the afternoon.

Notably, the tally does not include the recent yen exchange rate error at Toss Bank that occurred on March 10. At that time, the yen exchange rate was posted at about half the actual market rate, resulting in approximately 50,000 currency exchange transactions amounting to 28.38 billion won, and about 600 payment transactions totaling 3.3 million won in Japan. As of March 18, 567 transactions worth 1.4 billion won remain uncorrected.

There were also cases where a significant amount of time passed before the incidents were recognized. Toss Bank did not identify an error in the lending benchmark interest rate from October 2021 until September 2023, two years later. Likewise, a case of undeposited payment gateway cancellations at the Korea Financial Telecommunications & Clearings Institute in January 2024 was not discovered until July, more than half a year later.

K-Bank also identified a 2021 interest rate error only after 192 days had passed. These cases reveal not only the occurrence of incidents but also serious gaps in detection and response systems overall.

Although internet banks have implemented abnormal transaction detection systems and steadily increased their IT operations budgets, these efforts have been insufficient to prevent incidents. This year, KakaoBank's IT operations budget increased by 37% to 335.6 billion won compared to last year; Toss Bank's budget rose by 40% to 176.2 billion won; and K-Bank's budget grew by 23% to 160.1 billion won. Assemblyman Lee Yangsoo commented, "The recent series of IT incidents is heightening anxiety among financial consumers," and added, "Financial authorities need to develop comprehensive measures to address the overall IT operations framework at internet banks."

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