“Daejeon Office of Education has the most Google accounts hijacked… The fact of the attack was also recognized late.”

In relation to the fact that the Daejeon Metropolitan Office of Education suffered the most damage from a recent attack that took over Google accounts for school education (abnormal login, unauthorized change of password, etc.), it was pointed out that the Daejeon Metropolitan Office of Education's security system was weak.

Daejeon City Council member Choi Ji-yeon pointed out in the Board of Education's administrative audit of the city's Office of Education on the 11th, "The overwhelmingly large amount of damage in Daejeon among the hacking damage to educational Google accounts in provincial and provincial offices of education across the country is due to the weak security system of the Daejeon Office of Education."

According to the 'Results of a comprehensive investigation into the status of Google account use and information leakage damage in schools at each level of provincial and provincial offices of education' received from the Ministry of Education by Kang Kyeong-sook (proportional), a member of the National Assembly Education Committee, the Daejeon Metropolitan Office of Education had the largest number of damaged accounts with 74,246 accounts, accounting for 66.9% of the total number of damage cases (111,052).

Rep. Choi criticized, saying, "The actual strange behavior occurred in the early morning of September 26th, but the Office of Education was only made aware of the accident after receiving a phone call from the school two days later, on the morning of the 28th."

The Office of Education requested action from Google and sent an emergency official letter on October 2nd requesting password changes for all accounts and took steps to block the attack, but was unable to prevent the attempted attack the next day.

In the end, only after being notified by Google on October 4 of the mass unauthorized change of passwords, they reported to the superintendent, decided to take emergency measures, and blocked logins for all accounts.

According to data submitted to the Office of Education, two-step authentication was mandatory for institutional administrator accounts, but was optional for faculty and staff accounts, and the Office of Education did not even know the status of applying two-step authentication to faculty and staff accounts at the time of the incident.

After the incident, the Office of Education is considering mandating two-step authentication for faculty and staff accounts and converting the Google work environment to a paid version.

Rep. Choi said, "The Office of Education only recognized the incident late after receiving a report from the school, and even failed attempts to block the attack. Introducing a paid service cannot be a fundamental solution. We must first clearly identify what was lacking in the existing security system and why it was unable to detect and block large-scale attacks in advance."