Mercury, the number of attacks this year exceeds the total of the previous five years... Rapid increase in access to harmful IPs, etc.
Han attempted to access the homepage from the Netherlands... A total of 136 cases this year
(Seoul = Yonhap News) Reporter Ji-hoon Han = Hacking attempts targeting the Export-Import Bank of Korea this year were found to be nearly eight times the number of attempts last year.
Hacking attempts are continuing at the Bank of Korea, with additional attacks attempting to access the website from overseas detected last month.
However, it has been reported that these cases are not directly related to the recent financial sector artificial intelligence (AI) agent hacking incident.
◇ Mercury hacking attempts, 36 last year → 283 this year… 128 cases from the United States
According to data submitted by the Export-Import Bank and the Bank of Korea on the 7th by Rep. Lee Jong-wook of the People's Power Party, a member of the National Assembly's Finance and Economic Planning Committee, there were 283 hacking attempts targeting Mercury as of the 5th of this year.
This figure is approximately 7.9 times the 36 cases per year last year.
By year, there were 18 cases in 2021, 30 cases in 2022, 57 cases in 2023, 56 cases in 2024, and 36 cases last year.
The number of hacking attempts detected this year exceeded the total of 197 over the previous five years.
By attack type, 'access from harmful IP addresses, etc.' increased rapidly from 19 last year to 230 this year. It accounted for 81.3% of all attacks this year.
‘Web access attempts’ also increased from 17 last year to 53 this year.
Looking at the source of attacks, 272 were overseas, or 96.1% of the total. There were 11 cases in Korea.
The United States had the most cases with 128, followed by Singapore with 56 cases, China with 18 cases, the Netherlands with 12 cases, and Germany and Hong Kong with 10 cases each.
However, the Mercury announced that there have been no cases of hacking damage, including leakage of personal or credit information, over the past six years.
The Mercury explained that it is responding to cyber threats by operating a cyber security control center 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, sharing information with the Cyber Safety Center of the Ministry of Finance and Economy, and conducting cooperative control.
◇ The Bank of Korea’s website was attacked last month as well… A total of 136 cases this year
Hacking attempts targeting the Bank of Korea are continuing.
According to data submitted by the Bank of Korea, one unauthorized access attempt targeting the Bank of Korea's website was detected in the Netherlands last month.
If we add this one to the 135 hacking attempts from January to August of this year that have already been disclosed, the total is 136 as of the 2nd of this month this year. This is about 4.5 times the 30 cases per year last year.
The Bank of Korea previously announced that there were a total of 2,063 hacking attempts from 2021 to August of this year.
The targets of the attack were mainly systems operated on the Internet, such as the Bank of Korea representative website, economic statistics website, and electronic library.
There were also cases that led to actual damage.
In December 2023, the Bank of Korea's website suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, resulting in intermittent access delays.
From May to June of this year, an external intrusion occurred in the system used by the Bank of Korea's online training personal information processing company, and the personal information of 186 Bank of Korea employees was leaked.
The Bank of Korea announced that from last month to the 2nd of this month, there were no records of successful intrusions, service failures, data leaks, or personal or financial information leaks.
Rep. Lee Jong-wook said, "Amid the recent series of hacking incidents in the financial sector, cyber attacks targeting central banks and government-run banks have also appeared to have increased rapidly. We need to overhaul the security system and strengthen our response to prevent hacking attempts from leading to actual damage to the public."
