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A man in his 30s who tried to peek into the house with a camera attached to a 'wallpad' installed on the wall of an apartment living room and sell the filmed material was arrested by the police.
He has been identified as an expert who has appeared in the media with extensive knowledge in the field of information technology (IT) security.
Today (20th), the National Investigation Headquarters of the National Police Agency arrested a Mr. Lee on charges of violating the Information and Communications Network Act on the 14th and is investigating without detention.
Damaged apartment households alone account for 404,847 households nationwide.
The videos obtained by the police are 213 videos and more than 400,000 photos taken on 16 wall pads.
It has been about a year since the Korea Internet & Security Agency requested the police to investigate as photos and videos presumed to be the living room of a domestic apartment spread on overseas websites in November of last year.
The wall pad is a tablet-type device with home networking functions that is attached to the wall of the living room and checks outside visitors within the home and performs crime prevention, disaster prevention, and lighting control functions. It is equipped with a camera.
From August to November of last year, Mr. Lee secured a video of the house being filmed by hacking the server that centrally manages the wallpads of 638 apartments nationwide and the wallpads of each household in turn to obtain permission.
Mr. Lee was introduced as a security expert in the past and explained problems related to hacking of the wall pad installed in the living room and the central management server of the apartment.
The police explained that Lee had two previous convictions of the same type, including hacking and DDoS attacks.
It was revealed that he had considerable IT security knowledge and abused it for crimes, such as creating automated hacking programs and freely using tracking bypass methods and secure emails.
In fact, in order to avoid being tracked by investigative agencies, Lee first hacked wireless routers installed in multi-use facilities such as restaurants and lodgings, used them as transit points, and then broke into the apartment complex server.
Most apartments are connected to a single network, so it is known that hackers can look into the wall pads of all households by breaking through the central management server.
Mr. Lee attempted to sell the videos and photos obtained in this way on overseas Internet sites in November of last year.
At the time, he attached some screens of the secretly filmed video to the post and made a 'solicitation act' to contact me if interested in purchasing.
It has not been confirmed whether the video was actually sold or provided to a third party.
Mr. Lee stated to the police that he had hacked and provided the video to the outside in order to alert the police to the security of the wall pad, but the police believed that there was an actual intention to sell when Lee put off the email exchanged with the purchase contact.
Mr. Lee denies the possibility of committing the crime for sexual purposes, but the police have confirmed that there are also videos of sensitive body parts and are reviewing whether they can be prosecuted for sex crimes.
"We applied for an arrest warrant for the suspect, but it was rejected on the 16th, and we are conducting a reinforcement investigation," said Lee Kyu-bong, head of the cyber terrorism investigation team.
The police have been investigating in cooperation with the Korea Internet & Security Agency and wallpad manufacturers, and have delivered wallpad hacking criminal methods to the Ministry of Science and ICT so that they can be reflected in government measures and guidelines.
The police emphasized that in order to secure the network of multi-unit dwellings such as apartments, wall pad manufacturers, apartment server managers, and wall pad users in households must all comply with security rules.
In addition, operators of wireless routers installed in restaurants, cafes, and lodging establishments and users of personal wireless routers at home are requested to reset their administrator accounts and Wi-Fi access passwords to prevent them from being abused for crimes.