Two teenage hackers arrested for stealing personal data

Police have arrested two teenagers, who stole personal data of some 780 people from Internet portal sites and attempted to sell them to others for money.

According to the cyber-terror center at the National Policy Agency Thursday, a 19-year-old high school dropout identified only as his surname Kim obtained personal data of 780 people including resident-registration and credit-card numbers by hacking nine Internet portal sites from last March until recently. Among the attacked sites was one run by a credit-card settlement processing company. A 16-year-old high school student identified only as Lee, who helped Kim in the hacking, was also booked without physical detention. They are both facing charges of violating a law governing Internet usage, the police said.

Kim and Lee told the police that they got to know each other while working as interns for an information security company and colluded for the crime. They sent e-mails to about 2,000 officials at marketing and research firms introducing their plan to sell the data at prices ranging from 50 won to 600 won. They priced basic data such as name, address, resident-registration and telephone numbers at 50 won per capita while credit-card and bank-account numbers were priced at 300 won. Information related to annual incomes was priced at 600 won.

Huh Mun-Myung angelhuh@donga.com