July 25,2004

Korean Internet users¡¯ awareness of cyber security hasn¡¯t yet matched the
spread of high speed Internet in Korea. It is quite normal for hackers from
all over the world to want to test their skills in the country,¡± said Kwon
Seok-chul (34), the president and CEO of computer virus vaccine developer
HAURI Inc. He also pointed out, ¡°The damage done by the attacks on
administrative organizations such as the National Assembly and Korea
Institute for Defense Analyses could have been minimized had the users been
more careful.¡±

Currently about 11.6 million people are connected on high speed Internet in
Korea, arguably the best in the world ratio wise. However, the level of web
security falls short of standard. For example last year¡¯s ratio of the use
of computer virus vaccine programs was only
38 percent, almost half the numbers of Japan (74 percent) or the United
States (71 percent).

Kwon warned that situations like the recent hacking incident can happen
again, and the damage can be unthinkable. There was a time when only few
experts had the ability to hack through the web, but these days with great
amount of related information on the web it doesn¡¯t take a computer master
to hack a computer system. Moreover, personal computers are also targets for
hackers today.

Kwon also said, ¡°More hackers from all over the world hack systems of other
countries by way of Korea or test their skills by hacking Korean computer
systems.¡± This explains why Korea is the largest cyber-criminal as well as
the largest victim. According to a statistical research by Korea Information
Security Agency, the number of hacking reports filed by foreign countries on
Korea has grown form
468 in 2002 and 2,289 in 2003 to 1,634 in the first half of this year. 
Likewise, Hacking reports by Korea on other countries as well have increased
from 14,063 in 2002, 14,063 in 2003 to 10,634 in the first half of 2004.

Kwon worried about the increase of international underground hacker
organizations. ¡°Since they work stealthily it is hard to estimate the exact
number of such organizations, but a number of skilled hacker organizations
based on China and Eastern Europe stand out.¡± Said Kwon, adding, ¡°More and
more hackers say they can do anything for money. The increase of hackers
hired to steal secret information from competing companies is also notable.
The abilities of Korean hackers are generally known to be inferior to these
hackers.¡±

Surprisingly, Kwon found the reason of the lowering of standards of Korean
hackers from investigations in the late 1990¡¯s. He claims that the hacker
community vanished as the best hackers got arrested. 
¡°There had been a suggestion that we should train hackers for positive
purposes, but it became difficult to bring them out from underground,¡± says
Kwon.