Yegaram Savings Bank Downplayed Data Breach In Public Notice While Admitting To Authorities That Resident IDs and Addresses Were Stolen

[Anchor]

We turn now to breaking news on the financial sector hacking. It has been confirmed that Yegaram Savings Bank, which suffered the most severe damage in this cyberattack, downplayed the extent of the leak when disclosing it to the public. Even after customers' resident registration numbers and addresses were completely compromised, the bank acted as though nothing major had happened.

Reporter Choi Seunghun has this exclusive report.

[Reporter]

This is the personal information leak notice that Yegaram Savings Bank has kept posted on its website under the name of its CEO since October 2.

The notice specifies that only customers' names, dates of birth, and contact information were leaked in this hacking incident.

However, the very next day, October 3, the bank filed a completely different report with the Personal Information Protection Commission.

It confessed that the account numbers, addresses, and even resident registration numbers of over 50,000 customers had been stolen.

In effect, the bank came clean about the extent of the damage only to the authorities with the power to penalize them, while keeping silent toward the actual customers for a week.

When reporting began, the bank explained that some items might have been omitted during the hurried process of posting the notice, adding that it would look into the specific circumstances.

Meanwhile, a man in his 20s from China, identified by a U.S. cybersecurity firm as a possible attacker behind this financial sector hacking incident, admitted to SBS reporting crews that he had served as an administrator in an underground Telegram chat room where hackers shared attack methods and information.

However, he claimed that he merely "expelled fraud users" and had never directly participated in hacking or DDoS attacks.

[Hwang Seok-jin / Professor, Graduate School of Information Security, Dongguk University : To assert his innocence a bit, he even provided his mobile phone and is actively participating in forensics, so we need to verify whether his claims are true or not.]

It is understood that the police have also secured and are examining server-related records analyzed by the cybersecurity firm.

The police stated that they have expanded the investigation team from 28 to 43 members and are tracking the attackers in cooperation with overseas agencies.

(Photo: Yonhap News)
Reported by Park Hyun-chul | Video by So Ji-hye | Graphics by Choi Jae-young and Kim Han-gil | Data provided by the office of lawmaker Kim Hyoung-yeon
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.