South Korea says AI agents appear to have been used to hack the country's banks

81 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by thoughtpeddler

17 Comments

CyberMacGyver

5 hours ago

Fun story - About 10 years ago I was reversing a “new” malware that was monitoring all keystrokes on users computer but didn’t find it doing anything malicious. Turns out it was a keylogger installed by the banks that was required for customers to login to the bank account and for long time SK banks would only work on IE6

acheong08

4 hours ago

I've been trying to get in touch with South Korea's government IT. Have got really severe vulnerabilities that could literally compromise national security. No response so far but maybe been emailing the wrong places. If anyone could point me a direction, please shoot me an email.

WheatMillington

9 hours ago

Doesn't SK have famously, laughably terrible internet security by law?

turpentine

9 hours ago

afaik up to 2020, IE and ActiveX was required for online banking. Past that I heard you had to install a local webserver that the browser could communicate with. I'm not sure if any security issues are mandated by law, but it does sound like a minefield.

r1ch

8 hours ago

There's still a whole business sector selling snake oil "anti screenshot" software and such to banks and government agencies and such (complete with vulnerable kernel drivers of course). They learned nothing from the ActiveX days.

tangotaylor

8 hours ago

I’m curious to see their evidence on how they knew it was AI agents and which agents were used.

v3ss0n

4 hours ago

OpenAI user agent may be lol

consumer451

7 hours ago

SK is such a crazy arc. Somewhat recently got over famine and authoritarianism, then five families took over the whole country, while growing the economy to crazy levels per capita, in the fastest time ever.

They took over global pop music, while also entering demographic collapse faster than anyone.

In 2024 they had their own Jan 6th type event, but democracy appears to have won? Yet last month, they sent 30% of Russia's diesel imports via their ports, while very loudly complaining about the public announcement of two captured NK soldiers in Ukraine.

I am very ignorant, and I genuinely have no idea what is happening in SK. But last month, they were helping fund the NK + Russian war machine? What a trip.

phs318u

31 minutes ago

I’m waiting for a hospital to get hacked by A.I. and some poor folks to lose their lives or otherwise get severely injured as a result. It seems no one is meaningfully pulling the handbrake on these shenanigans so why wouldn’t it end up there?

jdw64

9 hours ago

I recently read reports about Korean banks that were not affected by the latest hacking incident.. They restrict work access to designated tablets only, and they don’t give loan recruiters access to the internal network or even a separate work system. When a recruiter hands a case over to a branch, the rest of the process is handled internally.

Looking at this, it seems that rather than making things easier because of AI, it actually requires more bureaucratic handling. The surface that made people comfortable is, paradoxically, becoming AI’s attack surface.

simianwords

5 hours ago

Here’s my bet: open weights AI will become powerful enough that it will be used by adversaries to create havoc.

This is the main risk that the labs OpenAI and Anthropic have called out for and asked for slowing the frontier.

Almost all people thought that this was fear mongering, hype marketing and regulation capture.

The same people will blame OpenAI and Anthropic for creating this.

iAMkenough

10 hours ago

Waiting for the day AI agents break into Nasdaq to achieve a goal.

ronnier

9 hours ago

Why are you waiting for this?

esseph

8 hours ago

You're right! There's no time like the present!

hc49

11 hours ago

We dont need banks. Interest bearing CBDC wallets is all most people need. Richie rich already hire people to keep tabs on their assets.