Reacting with urgent measures to crack down on possible cyber forgeries of government online registration documents and to cover loopholes in the e-government project, Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan led a policy meeting with government officials to discuss countermeasures yesterday.
The government said they will come up with comprehensive countermeasures by the end of next month to enforce punishment on counterfeiters and establish forgery prevention methods. This includes enforcing a system for officials to check the authenticity of submitted documents by comparing them with authentic documents available on the online database, reducing the unnecessary issuing of civilian documents, and inserting a cautionary phrase in civilian documents warning against counterfeits and forgery.
"The e-government business should accommodate citizens and should not be abused or defeated," said Oh Young-kyo, Minister of Home Affairs yesterday. "But such cyber hacking problems will always arise even if we enforce security in the e-government. To root out the essential problems, we need to eliminate the practice of submitting civilian registration documents, and establish a widely integrated information-sharing network from which citizens' registration information can be available," said Oh.
Furthermore, the government will establish an "administration information sharing system" by 2007 with related laws and policies to safeguard from hacking. A taskforce to prevent hacking of internet civilian documents will be established with the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, the National Tax Service, the Supreme Court, the National Intelligence Service and the National Computerization Agency, as well as systems integration firms and civilian hacking experts in affiliation.
A public relations officer of the Ministry of Home Affairs said "the possibility of hacking internet registration documents has been discovered, but actual damage has not been reported yet," adding "we will provide countermeasures so that by late October the online registries can be operating again."
But in contradiction to the statement from the Ministry of Home Affairs, six cases of counterfeit and forgery were reportedly discovered by judicial scriveners over the past year involving civil registration documents for resident, census, land, and property, according to the Supreme Court.
In these cases, documents were forged in order to prolong the term of a mortgage or secure a larger amount of money for a loan, to transfer real estate ownership, subscribe land ownership to one's own name, or to receive inheritance by fabricating census and property registrations.
In all of these cases, the counterfeiters took advantage of the policy at the scriveners' offices to give first priority to those people who visit the office from other districts, late in the afternoon. They assumed their counterfeited documents would receive a cursory examination; nevertheless they were exposed by officials who found their submitted documents to be suspicious.
The Supreme Court established guidelines for their officials to deal with counterfeit registration documents, creating a reward system that would pay 300,000 won to officials who expose and report counterfeit documents to the authorities.
The Supreme Court is also considering taking legal action against the internet security firm which reported the loopholes in the Supreme Court's registry by intentionally forging online documents to prove flaws in the system. Court officials claim that hacking done with malicious intentions can be charged with legal action.
Court officials are offering speculation that the internet security firm conspired with a printer manufacturing firm in order to forge documents from the online registry, with malicious intentions to slander the Supreme Court.
Court officials claim that contrary to reports that anyone with basic computer skills can forge online government documents, hacking can only be done with the expertise and technology of an internet security firm and a printer manufacturing company.
This is because during the hacking process, the network must be rigged to believe that the document is being sent to an imaginary printer, which then allows the computer to save the document as a file on a computer.
Report cards for English proficiency exams such as the Test Of English for International Communication, along with 21 civilian registration documents issued online are vulnerable to counterfeit and forgery, according to government officials.
Autor: Kwon Ji-young
Quelle: The Korea Herald , 29.09.2005
