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Korean ID Numbers Found On Google
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-08-02
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
South Korean resident registration numbers have turned up on Google, and the company will be asked to remove them from its index.
South Korea's Ministry of Communication and Industry found 95,219 of those numbers in Google's index. Just as Social Security numbers can be used for fraud in the US, these personally identifiable numbers could be misused in Korea.
The Korea Times reported that Google will need up to two months to remove this data. Along with the complete numbers found by the Ministry, they also discovered hundreds of thousands of partial numbers available through the site.
A Google representative and Ministry officials met in June about the problem. A Ministry official cited in the report said the representative agreed to cooperate with the Ministry on the issue.
The stolen numbers found their way into the hands of criminals, who used them to create fake IDs online. Abuses of the numbers discovered online impacted people all the way to the top of South Korea's government, the report noted:
Even the ID numbers of South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun and prime minister Han Myeong-sook had been freely circulated on the Internet until last month, when United Liberal Democrat lawmaker Ryu Geun-chan brought up the issue, saying that the president's personal numbers had been used 416 times for online verification and 280 times for adult verification at x-rated Web sites, probably by someone other than the president himself.
Previously, the Ministry had to email Google each time a number appeared in its search results. The Ministry has since automated the detection process, making it easier to report these exposures to Google.
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Tag: Google
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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