The South Korea Financial Services Commission convened an emergency review with the Financial Supervisory Service and directed all financial firms to complete comprehensive cybersecurity checks and report the results. The action follows signs of repeated cyberattacks against major financial companies and covers banks, card issuers, mutual finance providers, savings banks, insurers, securities firms and fintech companies. Firms must review external connections, authentication and access controls, threat detection, consumer protection arrangements and their use of shared threat intelligence. Reviews must identify all externally exposed IT assets and services, address vulnerabilities and confirm that detection systems reflect previously circulated information on attack IP addresses, methods and attempted intrusions. External access should be blocked unless essential, with unavoidable access limited to the minimum permissions and data required. Firms must also examine systems used by employees, loan brokers and contractors to prevent unnecessary storage or access to personal credit information and eliminate routes that omit or bypass authentication. Affected firms must promptly determine the scope of leaked information and potential consumer harm, take immediate steps to prevent further data or financial losses, and provide notification, redress and compensation where harm is confirmed. They must also strengthen monitoring and customer warnings against secondary fraud such as voice phishing and smishing. The authorities will intensify threat sharing and monitoring, take strict action where firms neglect known risks, promote artificial intelligence security testing and zero trust security frameworks, and assess whether the incidents warrant regulatory changes.

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