IDs for the taking on Web, agency says

Identity theft burst into the news a few weeks ago in connection with registrations for an Internet online game, and yesterday the Ministry of Information and Communication confirmed that the problem is severe. The ministry announced that it had been able to unearth such information as the names, national registration numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and occupations of nearly 620,000 people from about 1,950 Internet sites. Such information is in theory available only to the operators of Web sites, but through technical errors or plain sloppiness, it was open to indexing by search engines or perusal by any browsing Internet user. The sites on which the information was found included pages posted by individuals as well as private groups, corporate sites and even government-sponsored sites. The Korea Information Security Agency, an organ of the ministry, had been working on a project to see how much personal information was to be had on the Web. It developed software to search for the strings of digits comprising a registration number and also used the ubiquitous Google search site. A ministry official said that during the search, the information security body notified the operator of each site found to contain unprotected information and ordered them to delete the information from public view unless the people concerned had consented to it. The ministry said it would continue its project this year, and plans to check another 100,000 Korean Web sites. by Seo Ji-eun