Cyberattacks on Public Institutions Surge 40% in Two Years

Cyberattacks targeting public institutions have surged over 40% in the past two years. The Korea Inclusive Finance Agency (KIFA) alone has faced an average of 630,000 attacks per day, raising alarms about security.

On October 21, Jeong Tae-ho, a member of the National Assembly's Finance and Economy Planning Committee, analyzed data on cyberattacks against 257 public institutions. Last year, the total number of attempted cyberattacks reached 542,052,246.

Yearly trends show that attacks on public institutions increased from 283,917,150 in 2021 to 325,844,954 in 2022, 383,197,091 in 2023, and 436,237,916 in 2024. From January to August this year, there were 267,348,056 attacks, continuing the upward trend.

The increase in attacks last year was 24.3%, significantly higher than the 13.8% increase projected for 2024. Compared to 2023, the number of attacks has surged by 41.5% over two years.

The most common type of attack last year was Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), accounting for 75.3% of all incidents with 484,296,833 occurrences. Other types included unauthorized access attempts (65,608,382 incidents, 12.1%), information gathering attempts (23,733,492 incidents, 4.4%), and system privilege escalation attempts (540,217 incidents, 1.0%).

The KIFA was the most targeted institution, receiving 1,314,170,000 attack attempts from 2021 to August this year, which represents 58.7% of the total attacks on all 257 institutions (2,238,590,000). This averages to about 630,000 attacks per day.

KIFA's attack attempts increased from 156,470,000 in 2021 to 206,700,000 in 2022, 306,500,000 in 2023, and 311,180,000 in 2024, with a slight decrease last year. From January to August this year, there were 152,630,000 attempts.

KIFA is responsible for policy financing for low-income and low-credit individuals, raising concerns about the potential exposure of sensitive economic information, such as income, debt, and delinquencies, in the event of a data breach.

Attempts to breach KIFA's data reached 961,643 from January to August this year, the highest since 2021, accounting for 45.5% of all public institution data breach attempts (2,112,838).

Despite the increasing sophistication and scale of cyberattacks, the IT infrastructure of public institutions is severely outdated. Among the 257 public institutions, 32.8% of the 45,459 computers are beyond their useful life, totaling 14,894 outdated devices.

Notably, 119 out of 120 servers (99.1%) at the Korea Consumer Agency are outdated. The agency faced 5.1 million attacks last year, ranking eighth among all institutions. The Game Rating and Administration Committee, another frequent target, has 30 out of 45 servers (66.7%) and 8 out of 10 storage devices outdated.

Jeong emphasized that the increasing cyberattacks on public institutions, coupled with outdated IT equipment, heighten security vulnerabilities. He urged for proactive measures to replace old equipment and strengthen security systems to protect citizens' personal information and ensure stable public services.

In response to the rising incidents of data breaches and ransomware attacks in the public sector, the government announced a plan on October 1 to enhance accountability in public sector cybersecurity. Under this plan, if a significant data breach occurs in a public institution, the responsibility will extend beyond the operational staff to include senior management and heads of institutions.