“Douzone Bizon cyber incident deemed ‘serious’”... Government launches joint public-private investigation

[Financial News] The government has launched a joint public-private investigation into a series of cybersecurity incidents at enterprise software provider Douzone Bizon. Given the possibility that the damage could spread to Douzone Bizon’s client companies, among other factors, the government deemed the case a serious incident and decided to form an investigative team that includes private-sector experts to determine the causes and scale of the damage.
The Ministry of Science and ICT said on the 26th that it had formed a Public-Private Joint Investigation Team on the 25th to investigate the cybersecurity incidents at Douzone Bizon and had begun a full-scale investigation.
Douzone Bizon is an information and communications technology (ICT) company that supplies enterprise software, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance and accounting, and groupware. It had earlier reported cybersecurity incidents on the 16th and 21st.
The first incident occurred on a development server related to the accounting and tax program Smart A 10. In a notice on its website on the 18th, the company said it had confirmed records showing that an unidentified outsider used an employee’s virtual private network (VPN) account on the 15th to access internal systems without authorization and view data.
The second incident was identified in the APO Backup Service. In a notice on the 23rd, Douzone Bizon said it had found indications that some encrypted data stored on a backup server had been taken outside.
On the day each report was received, the Ministry of Science and ICT and the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) asked the company to preserve relevant materials and have since been examining the circumstances of the incidents and the scope of the damage.
The ministry later convened an emergency meeting of the Cyber Incident Investigation Review Committee on the 25th to assess the seriousness of the matter. The committee is a statutory body established under the Information and Communications Network Act, which took effect on the 1st, to proactively respond to cyber incidents. It determined that a separate Public-Private Joint Investigation Team should be deployed to investigate this incident.
After reviewing the committee’s findings, the potential impact on Douzone Bizon’s client companies, and the possibility of further damage, the ministry made the final decision to conduct a joint investigation.
The investigation team is led by the Director General for Information Security and Network Policy at the Ministry of Science and ICT and includes KISA officials and private-sector experts in cybersecurity, systems, and networks. The government plans to use the team to identify the intrusion route, the causes of the incidents, and the actual scale of the damage, and to make the findings public.
[email protected] Choi Hye-rim Reporter