.
Before delivering his lecture, KISA President Lee Ki-Joo expressed his deep concerns over rampant cyber attacks and strongly underlined the need for building a powerful response mechanism against frequent outbreaks of cyber attacks, saying, “I felt so frustrated with the way South Korea’s cyber diplomacy handled the recent two massive cyber-attacks – the 3.20 and 6.25 attacks.”
The occurrence of cybercrimes around the globe has been on a steep upward trajectory since SNS started to sweep though the world in 2011. In early days, individual hackers committed cybercrimes for simple purposes – for example, in an act of self-display or in pursuit of illicit economic gains. However, recent cyber attacks took place in the form of the so-called APTs (Advanced Persistent Threat), in which certain hacker groups carefully, cunningly craft their hacking tactics for a long period of time in order to paralyze a specific target such as national institutions. APT attacks indeed smack of cyber terrorism that is aimed to bring chaos to society, explained President Lee.
Then, President Lee touched upon the outline of the 6.25 cyber attack, which indiscriminately unleashed distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS) on government agencies’ DNS servers. Since the 6.25 attack erupted simultaneously using three different cyber attack tactics – making alterations to websites, destruction of servers and distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), KISA had difficulty pinpointing exactly what triggered the cyber attack and launching proper responses in a timely manner, said President Lee.
“In addition, the worldwide cyber security market, currently valued at KRW 190 trillion, is projected to reach KRW 314 trillion in 2017 on the back of moves towards ‘industrial convergence’ or ‘consolidation.’ South Korea is one of the key nations that are capable of independently producing their own information protection technologies in both software and hardware services sectors. Though South Korea’s ICT capital ranks 1st in the world, our cyber security system is more vulnerable to cyber attacks than other advanced nations’ including the US, China, Japan, Israel, etc. On top of that, South Korea is faced with a severe lack of cyber security personnel,” he added.
President Lee mentioned the following as future tasks: the building of systems for cyber security personnel exchanges and information sharing; sophistication of security systems in response to new cyber threats such as APT; building of cyber attack simulation centers aimed to train professional cyber security officers; cyber attack-prone institutions’ voluntary provision of information on their anti-cyber attack measures; making the designation of executive-level CISOs (chief information security officer) mandatory; expansion of new ICT services and stepped-up R&D (research and development) investment in the development of world-class cyber security solutions; development of online security technologies that expedite the cyber security industry’s convergence with other industries such as cars, medicine, shipbuilding and intelligent robots; and nurturing information protection experts by expanding national cyber security expert qualification systems (e.g. the national SIS (Specialist for Information Security) program).
“Furthermore, probes into C&C (command and control) servers that did hackers’ bidding revealed that cyber attacks on South Korea often originated from other nations, so cross-border cooperation and coordination in responding to cyber attacks are necessary. Above all, it is important for the cyber security industry to sort out strategic export items, export Korean information protection systems to developing nations and offer them customized services,” he stressed.
President Lee ended his lecture, saying, “Unlike physical and military attacks, it is sometimes even impossible to nail the mastermind behind cyber attacks. And if even we do know what caused the cyber attack, it is still tricky to swiftly contain the attack. To nurture South Korea into a cyber security powerhouse, continued interests and investment are badly needed.”
The breakfast seminar was rounded off with IPAK’s naming President Lee as the chairman of the 25th Global Software Contest, designed to discover, nurture creative software talent. Under the slogan “Imagine! Create! Challenge!,” the 25th Global Software Contest will accept entries until August.
