Lee Gyu-lee is a business writer at The Korea Times, focusing primarily on IT & telecommunications, the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy and KOTRA. Prior to this, she has covered a wide range of cultural news, from film, television and K-pop to lifestyle and fashion.
AI takes lead in fight against voice phishing in wake of SK Telecom hack
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By Lee Gyu-lee
Telecoms ramp up AI-powered defenses amid rise in fraudulent apps and phishing crimes
Amid growing concerns that leaked personal information from the recent SK Telecom data breach could fuel a surge in voice phishing crimes, local telecom providers are racing to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to detect and block increasingly sophisticated scams.
Last month, cybersecurity firm EverSpin reported a rise in malicious apps disguised as legitimate ones — such as those of the Korea Consumer Agency or SK Telecom’s SmartSafe— particularly in early May, shortly after news of the breach first surfaced in April.
LG Uplus has joined hands with KT and the Korea Federation of Banks (KFB) by signing a memorandum of understanding on Friday to bolster preventive measures against phishing scams.
The partnership aims to establish multilateral collaboration on advancing phishing detection systems and raise public awareness of such crimes. The KFB will provide telecom companies with a database of phone numbers in the banking sector. At the same time, LG Uplus and KT will leverage their AI-powered phishing detection and data analytic technologies to enhance security systems that detect fraudulent transactions among bank customers.
LG Uplus plans to use its AI agent service ixi-O to create an integrated security environment that spans the financial and telecom sectors.
“Through this cooperation between two sectors, we aim to minimize damages caused by these crimes. We will create a safe and reliable financial and telecom environment … providing services that everyone can use with confidence,” LG Uplus Vice President Lee Jae-won said.
LG Uplus officials demonstrate its artificial intelligence-powered system to detect and analyze attempted voice phishing crimes, in a photo provided by the company on May 15. Courtesy of LG Uplus
The company has been using its AI-based analysis system and working closely with police to combat fraudulent activities, successfully preventing phishing crimes with estimated damages of about 208.7 billion won ($151.6 million) between this February and April alone.
Its AI system detected 5,090 malicious apps linked to phishing scams and shared them with law enforcement for police to physically reach out to the potential victims to remove malware.
KT has also been proactive, rolling out an AI-based voice phishing detection and alerting service in January. Within just two months, it spotted 1,528 suspicious calls with an accuracy rate of 90.3 percent, flagging 392 as actual attempts of phishing. The estimated damage prevented through this detection accumulates to about 16 billion won, based on the average estimate per phishing incident.
The company is also partnering with the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency to track links to malicious apps in order to identify victims and help prevent further damages by blocking financial transactions. Since April, it also has been working with Kbank to directly provide information detected through its AI system, which allows real-time response to financial frauds. KT said it plans to further enhance the accuracy of its AI-powered detector and update its whitelist by the first half of this year.
Meanwhile, SK Telecom has incorporated its AI security platform Scam Vanguard to IBK Bank and its AI agent. This system detects real-time phishing crimes by monitoring texts and chats, analyzing patterns to suspect whether they are scams. The company reported that it prevented 26 cases of fraud and about 590 million won worth of damages in just two weeks after it implemented the system in IBK Bank.