A total of 1,034 hacking accidents occurred in the first half of this year, up about 15% from the same period last year. Concerns are growing that the daily lives of both the people and companies are threatened by increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.
According to the “Cyber Threat Trends in the First Half of 2025” released by the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) on the 7th, the number of infringement accidents increased from 899 in the first half of last year to 1,034 this year. As for hacking methods, server penetration was still the most at 51.4%, followed by DDoS (23.0%), malicious code (11.1%), and ransomware (7.9%).
In particular, major services have been paralyzed due to ransomware infections such as Yes24 and SGI Seoul Guarantee Insurance. However, a quarter of the affected companies still do not have a backup system, making it difficult to recover and prolonged damage. According to the report, 44.4% of ransomware-affected companies were also infected with the backup system.
Hacking in the information and communication sector was the most common with 390 cases, followed by manufacturing (157 cases), wholesale and retail (132 cases), and other sectors (296 cases). In particular, the SK Telecom hacking incident was blamed for loopholes in the overall security system, such as poor account management and insufficient encryption. In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), the government plans to introduce AI technology to the entire response process to counter cyberattacks that are becoming more sophisticated. “The government is actively introducing cybersecurity-specific AI in the entire period of responding to infringement incidents such as detection, response, investigation, and analysis to respond to increasingly intelligent and advanced cyber threats,” said Choi Woo-hyuk, policy officer for the information protection network at the Ministry of Science and ICT.
