Fear Spreads as Secondary Financial Sector Also Hit with 40,000 Personal Information Leaks

As personal information leaks suspected to be caused by artificial intelligence hacking attacks continue to occur at commercial banks, damage has also been confirmed at Yegaram Savings Bank, a secondary financial institution.

Yegaram Savings Bank posted an apology for the personal information leak yesterday, stating that it confirmed customer information was leaked after an unidentified hacker accessed a server containing customer personal information on September 30.

The leaked personal information included customers' names, dates of birth, and phone numbers.

The scale of the leak is estimated to be around 40,000 people, though the exact extent of the damage has not yet been confirmed.

The bank stated that immediately after becoming aware of the leak, it strengthened security monitoring to prevent further spread of damage and would operate a customer service center to support damage relief for customers.

Previously, around the same period, commercial banks such as Shinhan Bank and Hana Bank suffered unprecedented incidents where customer information was leaked following simultaneous hacking attacks.

In particular, circumstantial evidence of artificial intelligence being utilized in the hacking was captured when a Chinese character string reading "AI Autonomous Penetration Test Console" was discovered on some pages of an external web server suspected of being used in the attack on Shinhan Bank, which suffered hacking damage.

The security industry suspects that China's open-source AI tool "ARTEX AI" was used in this attack.

The program was originally developed for the purpose of checking system vulnerabilities, but it is suspected that hackers abused it as an attack tool to breach financial company systems.

The Cyber Terror Investigation Division of the National Police Agency has initiated a pre-indictment investigation into the banks that suffered hacking damage, and the Financial Supervisory Service is conducting emergency on-site inspections and monitoring targeting the leaked banks.

Reported by Park Se-won | Video by Na Hong-hee | Graphics by Lee Jung-joo | Produced by SBS Digital News
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.