By Kim Tong-hyung

Korea is attempting to present computer security as a topic of discussion for the Group of 20 meetings in Seoul later this year. However, the talks for establishing an international body for combating cybercrimes seem to be discouraged.

The Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country’s converged regulator for broadcasting and telecommunications, and the Ministry of Public Administration and Security had vowed to include the forming of the new body as an agenda for November’s G20 summit of world leaders.

Government officials now confess to the difficulties of getting everyone on the same page. The Public Administration Ministry announced in February that the country was considering establishing the international cybercrime organizations here. But the difficulty in securing the budget, as well as the slow advancement in related research, appears to have pushed the plans to the backburner for now.

“The talks about the international body have been consistent since last year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) cyber security seminar and we will continue to report on the progress of our preparation later this month,” said a ministry official.

“It will be difficult to include the talks about the international body on the G20 agenda. We have yet to achieve agreement over our plans with other G20 countries and we need more talks.”

The establishment of an international cybercrimes body based in Korea would be somewhat of an ironic development, as a slew of data breaches in past years have proved that the country doesn’t have a computer security defense system.

Security is becoming an increasing problem due to the sophistication of cybercrimes, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which are triggered by massive networks of hijacked computers used by hackers to cause disruption and steal data. Korea’s computer security mettle was tested unfavorably during a massive DDoS attack that crippled over 80,000 computers at homes and offices in July last year.

With security issues expected to become an increasing problem as computing moves toward the server-based “cloud” era, which further blurs the geographic boundaries in information technology (IT) services, policymakers here are stressing the need for better international collaboration.

“The G20 is obviously focused on the talks to strengthen the economic recovery and fix global financial systems, but with the increasing number of cyber attacks on online financial services and e-commerce services, security has become a real economic issue. Discussing the issue as a G20 topic would be meaningful,” said an official from the Financial Security Agency.