South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol ordered his team of chief secretaries on Monday to launch a task force dedicated to national security in response to the chaos which unplugged the nation for at least three days.
The task force will be led by the Office of National Security. Kim Sung-han, the National Security Adviser, will preside at upcoming meetings to inspect nationwide postures of cybersecurity.
The task force will bring different ministries together, including the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of National Defense, the National Intelligence Service, and the offices of the prosecution and police service.
Below are the key facts of the Kakao outage.
1. KakaoTalk dominates the South Korean mobile message service market, holding 92% of the population as its users.
2. On October 15, a fire broke out at an SK C&C data center in Pangyo where Kakao’s data is stored and managed. (The fire was put out in eight hours.)
3. All services which were tied to KakaoTalk did not work since the fire. The halted services include online banking and transportation services.
4. Hacking attempts, aimed to hack Kakao users, were discovered among the chaos. To read the original reporting, click here.
5. Shares of Kakao Corp have been plunging since the fire to their lowest valuation since May 2020.
