Personal data of some 38,000 customers at Daishin Securities leaked

Seoul: Personal information of 38,490 customers has been leaked from Daishin Securities, the brokerage said on Wednesday.

Sensitive information, including names, e-mail addresses and mobile phone numbers, was found to have been leaked after the brokerage detected signs of unauthorised access by hackers last week, the securities firm said, reports Yonhap news agency.

Meanwhile, the government is set to carry out large-scale vulnerability inspections on around 170 key information technology (IT) infrastructures in the private sector, amid back-to-back cybersecurity breaches at public institutions and financial firms, an official said on Wednesday.

The ministry of science and ICT will conduct a security vulnerability assessment targeting 111 public organisations that manage such infrastructures, with a particular focus on those connected to the Internet, such as web pages and public-facing servers.

Inspections are expected to conclude by the end of the year at the latest, the official added.

The latest measures come after a total of 16 commercial banks reported cyberattacks that led to the breach of customer data this year.

President Lee Jae Myung has also expressed concern over such attacks, calling for the country to develop cybersecurity methods suited to the artificial intelligence (AI) era.

South Korea's science ministry has raised the country's cyber crisis warning level up a notch, as it joined global efforts to address two critical cybersecurity flaws involving PHP, a programming language that powers most of the internet.

The warning level was raised to "caution," the second lowest in its four-tier system, as of noon, while companies and government agencies were requested to carry out updates to safely patch their systems, according to the ministry.

"The flaw found in PHP could affect a number of websites and requires an urgent response as exploit codes have already been made publicly available," Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon was quoted as saying in a release.

The latest measure comes a day after government agencies and companies worldwide shut down websites due to the vulnerabilities, which came to light by utilising artificial intelligence (AI). Cybersecurity firm Wiz -- one of the companies whose researchers uncovered the flaws -- described them as the "most sever" vulnerabilities ever detected by AI.

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