SEOUL, KOREA - Stepping into his HFITC Lab in Seocho-Dong, Seoul, one could not help but notice a blunt slogan hanging in one corner of the office, ‘No Lip Service.’ Professor Park Dea Woo of the Hacking Forensic, Information Technology Communication Lab at Hoseo Gaduate School of Venture explains that the goal of his Lab was to produce meaningful and practical output in lieu of lip-service.
As a founding member of the HFITC Lab in 2008, Park and his colleagues together with sixteen graduate research assistants had been working together to produce 90 theses, 56 of which had been published in Korean academic journals and 34 in the overseas ones. The Lab has also been engaged in many hacking forensics projects through which it researches and developes practical techniques in the field.
Professor Park explains the essence of forensics. “As you might have seen from the famous TV show ‘CSI,’ forensics is to secure the evidence to a crime by protecting their integrity and originality. In terms of cyber crime, the cyber forensics means doing exactly the same in the cyber space, as the growing number of IT devices, such as tablet PCs and smart phones are now being used for the crime and we need to secure the evidences as we do in the conventional crime.”
As deputy chairman of the Korea Digital Forensics Society and the director of Korea Forensic Society, Park is busy developing technologies to collect evidence from the digital devices and encourage researches to support such developments.
Nowadays, not only criminal investigators, but also auditors in the private sector are adopting e-Discovery to prepare legal evidence on cyber crimes, such as trade secrets leakage and cyber terrorism. “Digital forensic is expected to become a part of the investigative procedures in terms of preventative measures to illegal activities in cyber space, by assisting the preparation of legal evidence to civil or criminal offenses,” says Professor Park. As of 2013, the demand for digital forensics has expanded from conventional investigative agencies, by the Public Prosecutors’ Office, National Police Agency, National Information Service and Defense Security Command to administrative purposes, such as entry/departure management by the Department of Justice, illegal import control by Korea Customs Service, and copyright management by the Korea Copyright Commission of Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. “I anticipate that hacking digital forensics will grow even more important as the protection of intellectual property rights on a nation’s technologies, designs and brands become ever more valuable,” Professor Park comments. Indeed with the proliferation of free trade agreements with many countries and economic blocks across the world, digital forensics is expected by many forecasters in the industry to become an important element intellectual properties and technologies of Korea.
Professor Park is actively engaged in activities to develop Korean digital forensics further, as he serves for many organizations in many capacities, such as Secretary-General at the National Cyber Security Policy Forum, chairman of Forum of Hacking Security Technology, Organizing Committee Chair of AsiaJcis 2013, and advisor to many national assemblymen and government organizations on information protection.
He asserts that cyber terrorism is happening not only in other parts of the world, but also in our own backyard now. “As the nation is being managed by created digital information, shared and distributed through the interconnected information networks, electricity, telecommunication, transportation and other major national social infrastructure are being controlled in the cyberspace, and the war in cyberspace is happening every second as we speak,” he claims with confidence and continues to demand that “the legislative and administrative bodies must prepare laws and plans on cyber terror and cyber warfare, and the president’s office must take the role of the cybersecurity control tower and place dedicated sub-organizations that will prevent cyber terrorism and protect the country from it on a real-time basis.”
Park offers what preparation is needed to ensure that cyber terrorism Korea suffered earlier this year stops, that the private sector must start developing expert human resources on cybersecurity and develop dedicated technologies to protect the national assets and population from the cyber terror and cyber warfare of the present and future.
