The SK Telecom headquarters (Image courtesy of SK Telecom)
SEOUL, May 26 (Korea Bizwire) — A joint government-private investigation team looking into SK Telecom Co.’s recent large-scale data breach has extended its probe to the servers of other major mobile carriers and platform companies, but found no signs they have been compromised, industry sources said Monday.
Initially, the team had asked local telecommunications and platform companies to conduct their own cybersecurity inspections.
Last week, they changed their approach and conducted on-site inspections at telecom carriers KT Corp. and LG Uplus Corp., as well as four major platform companies — Naver Corp., Kakao Corp., Coupang Inc. and Baedal Minjok, according to the sources.
The investigation was expanded amid rising concerns that hackers using BPFDoor malware variants could have targeted other Korean tech firms.
Following the probe, investigators said no traces of hacking activity have been found so far on the servers of any of the six companies inspected.
In a media briefing last week, the investigation team revealed interim findings indicating that 25 malware variants had been discovered on 23 servers belonging to SK Telecom. These included 24 variants of the BPFDoor malware and one variant of WebCell.
Two of the affected servers had been used as temporary storage for personal data, such as names, birthdates, phone numbers and email addresses, as well as international mobile equipment identity (IMEI) data.
The IMEI is a unique identifier for each device on a network and could potentially be exploited in financial transactions.
SK Telecom discovered the breach April 18.
(Yonhap)
