Judiciary too laid-back on North’s cyberattacks

The government must urgently devise a countermeasure for such cyberattacks.

It turned out that North Korean hackers have siphoned a massive amount of data from the computer network of South Korean courts over the past two years after implanting a malicious code. According to the announcement on Saturday by the National Investigation Headquarters of the National Police Agency, the North’s hacking group stole highly sensitive information for 25 months from January 2021 to February 2023.

During the period, 1,014 gigabits of data leaked to North Korea via four domestic servers and four overseas servers. The leaked information includes the names and residential registration numbers of South Korean citizens, as well as their financial and medical records. Such a shocking cyberattack on our judiciary has been affirmed for the first time.

However, the judiciary’s response to the cyberattack makes us dumbfounded. The judiciary has been keeping not only general information about citizens but also a vast amount of sensitive data on government agencies and private companies. If such information is leaked outside, it can threaten our national security, not to mention the possibility of being exploited through phishing. The judiciary’s sheer ignorance of the cyber infiltration shows how lax its security system has been.

The judiciary’s dillydallying even after detecting a malicious code in its system in February 2023 made matters even worse. Despite the need for the branch to report such an alarming incident to security agencies, it didn’t report it to them. In the meantime, most of the leaked data still kept in external servers was deleted, which made it impossible for our security authorities to find the North’s hacking routes and the scope of the stolen data. The police and the prosecution said they confirmed only 0.5 percent of the extensive data stolen. The North’s hacking of our judiciary is shocking, but even more shocking is our authorities’ inability to find what data was stolen.

North Korea’s hacking ability has advanced more than before. Last month, a hacking group in North Korea was found to have launched an all-out cyberattack on our defense industry to steal its advanced military technology. At the time, more than 10 large defense companies had their sensitive technology pirated by the North. But some of them were not even aware of the theft for more than a year.

As we saw in the Ukraine war, cyberwar capabilities are essential for national security. Laid-back preparation against enemies’ hacking campaigns can have a devastating impact on our security. The government must urgently devise a countermeasure for such cyberattacks. Our lawmakers must speed up their enactment of a cybersecurity bill.