25 million South Korean social media accounts hacked

A 31-year-old citizen purchased private information from another individual to hack into user accounts on Naver, a popular search portal, and then spam users to scrape up $148,000.

The suspect, surnamed Seo, bought names, residential numbers, Internet IDs and passwords from a Korean-Chinese.

The police also caught a self-taught computer programmer by the last name of Hong who developed hacking programs that aided Seo’s scam. The tools automatically enter IDs and passwords to log in to Naver. The information extracted was supplied to Seo.

A Naver official told Korea Herald the company “was not able to prevent such attempts at accessing and abusing data from outside sources,” stressing that “Naver was not at fault regarding the incident,” and adding that “a bigger problem was that it was too easy for people to get their hands on the personal information of others.”

ThreatWatch is a regularly updated catalog of data breaches successfully striking every sector of the globe, as reported by journalists, researchers and the victims themselves.