Over 110,000 Korean student Google accounts hacked, ministry orders password reset

More than 110,000 Google accounts used by Korean students for online learning have been hacked, prompting the Ministry of Education to order an urgent password reset at education offices.

That is 2.3 percent of the 4,987,312 Google accounts run by the country’s 16 regional education offices and their schools as of 6 p.m. Wednesday. The Google Workspace accounts were opened in 2020 for remote classes during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Daejeon had the most hacked accounts at 74,246, followed by Seoul with 35,500, South Gyeongsang with 1,757, the merged Jeonnam-Gwangju region with 941 and Gyeonggi with 446. No damage was reported at the other education offices.

Passwords have been changed on 3,597,546 accounts, or 72.1 percent of all accounts.

The ministry said it sent an official notice to education offices nationwide requesting password changes after confirming that learning accounts at some offices had been hacked.

“Hacking has suddenly been occurring recently,” Education Minister Choi Kyo-jin said at a parliamentary audit on Oct. 7. “We hear that the passwords of a very large number of students have been changed at universities and education offices as well, and we are taking this very seriously.”

BY KIM MAN-SANG [[email protected]]