Cellular community operator SK Telecom, which serves roughly 34 million subscribers in South Korea, has confirmed that it suffered a cyber assault earlier this month that noticed malware infiltrate its inside methods, and entry information associated to prospects’ SIM playing cards.
The breach occurred at round 11pm native time, on the night time of Saturday 19 April 2025, in what’s believed to have been an assault deliberately timed to use a day and time when there could also be much less employees monitoring in place.
Responsibly, SK Telecom knowledgeable the Korean Web & Safety Company (KISA) the next day, and fulfilled its authorized obligation to inform the Private Info Safety Fee on Monday 21 April that there had been a possible information breach.
Though no buyer names, beginning dates, or monetary particulars had been leaked, the data figuring out SIM playing cards is taken into account extremely delicate – because it may allow a decided legal to hijack victims’ cellphone numbers in a “SIM Swap” assault.
SK Telecom says that its engineers detected and deleted the malware menace on its community, and took the compromised community servers offline as quickly because it realised {that a} information breach could have occurred. Sadly, regardless of its greatest efforts – hundreds of thousands of customers’ SIM particulars may have been put in danger, and will now be within the arms of cybercriminals.
Though SK Telecom has not confirmed the whole variety of customers whose SIM particulars have been uncovered, it has acknowledged that hundreds of thousands of people might be in danger.
The excellent news is that SK Telecom says it has seen no proof that the delicate information has been exploited by cybercriminals. The dangerous information is that it would not essentially know if it had been exploited or not.
Since its breach, SK Telecom has confronted some criticism for the best way it has communicated information of the cyber assault to its prospects. Though it up to date its web site and cellular app with a safety advisory, some customers felt they need to even have proactively acquired an SMS alert informing them of the state of affairs.
Apologising for the breach and responding to complaints about its response to the incident, SK Telecom has apologised and begun to ship out SMS notifications to prospects. As well as, the corporate has stated it’s strengthening its safety within the hope of stopping related incidents in future, and pledged to have a clear inquiry into what occurred.
Hacks like this are a wake-up name for telecoms companies worldwide that they have to safe their methods in opposition to the specter of cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers.
And all companies could be clever to study that hackers may try and strike at anytime, day or night time, not simply throughout weekday enterprise hours.
If a hacker can exploit a window of alternative – reminiscent of late within the night on a weekend – to sneak into your community undetected, they will not have any qualms about doing so.
Companies which are dealing with important or delicate information ought to guarantee their alerting methods and incident response plans work via weekends and holidays simply as simply as every other day of the week.
