The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said Monday that they arrested two men in connection with hacking into Hyundai Capital and stealing 420,000 of its client records. The hackers wanted $460,500 not to disclose the information it had stolen.
According to this story in the Korea Times, one of the men arrested was a hacker named Huh while the other was an accomplice who acted as the bag man for part of the blackmail money paid by Hyundai.
The Korea Times quotes a police spokesperson as saying:
"Huh met a hacker surnamed Shin in the Philippines in December and plotted the hacking... They met through another hacker who proposed they could earn a lot of money by hacking the databases of large companies and blackmailing them. Huh raised the funds for the plot and sent it to the hackers in the Philippines."
Shin fled to the Philippines in 2007 to avoid prosecution for hacking other corporate sites, the Korea Times says.
Interpol are now looking for Shin and the other hackers, who haven't been specifically identified.
The South Korean police are also looking to see whether current or former Hyundai Capital employees might be involved.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.