KT Corp.’s headquarters in central Seoul is seen in this file photo taken Nov. 3, 2020. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Oct. 29 (Korea Bizwire) — The Ministry of Science and ICT on Friday said it will come up with measures restricting the concurrent update of routers to prevent recurrence of a network outage that crippled the country earlier this week.
On Monday, wired and wireless network services provided by KT Corp., a major South Korean telecom operator, were disrupted for over an hour from 11:16 a.m. KT users across the country had difficulty gaining access to the internet, payment and phone call services.
KT initially suspected a cyberattack, but later said a routing error that occurred in the process of upgrading equipment was to blame for the network disruptions.
On Friday, Cho Kyeong-sik, second vice science minister, said in a press briefing that the outage was caused by a KT employee’s mistake in typing the setting command while updating the router.
Cho said that the employee forgot to insert the command “exit” as he was finishing updating the router.
The ministry said it is reviewing ways to restrict telecom operators from carrying out concurrent updates of network pathways prevent excessive traffic surge in the server.
It will also introduce a “simulation system” in which companies can locate errors before updating the router.
The ministry on Friday confirmed there were no distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on KT networks.
A DDoS attack refers to a situation in which a multitude of infected computers are directed to try to communicate with a single other computer, overwhelming its connection bandwidth and crowding out legitimate users from access to the site.
(Yonhap)
