KISA Responsible for MSN Blunder
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
With the country continuing to be exposed for its holes in online security, authorities and computer experts at the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA) certainly have their work cut out for them.
Their job qualifications seem to be a different matter altogether, as the agency's response to a recent cyber problem was to blunder, panic and cover it up.
Users of Microsoft's MSN Messenger instant messaging service were frustrated earlier this week when the service was shut down for more than 12 hours from around 9 p.m. on Tuesday to the following morning.
KISA was quick to announce that the malfunction was related to a problem with Microsoft's U.S.-based server, reporting it as such to the authorities at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's converged regulator for broadcasting and telecommunications.
However, the agency is now enduring a massive egging from the media and bloggers after it was found that it had mistakenly included Microsoft's Hotmail accounts on its list of malicious Web sources, which was confirmed as the cause of the MSN malfunction rather than an imaginary server flaw.
KISA updates its list of red-flagged Web sites every day for Internet service providers such as KT to prevent Internet users from accessing them. These Web sites are suspected as seedbeds of malware or are being used for other types of cyber crimes.
On Tuesday, Hotmail.com somehow ended up among the names of malicious domains.
``We have now confirmed that there is nothing wrong with Hotmail.com,'' said an official at KISA, a KCC sub-organization.
KISA's monitoring process is based on its screening of malicious software, and after a detection of abnormal activity, the agency's employees personally check the sites to search for problems.
``When we were checking Hotmail.com, the Web pages didn't open normally, so it was included in the list of malicious domains. We regret our mistake, and for major `white-list' Web services such as Hotmail.com, we are planning to improve our monitoring methods and reduce blunders like these,'' the KISA official said.