The 20 financial firms with the most frequent IT outages spent less than 70% of their information security budgets last year, raising questions about how aggressively they invest in protecting customer data and assets.
The 20 firms, ranked by the number of IT outages, set aside a combined 438 billion won ($307 million) for information security last year, according to data submitted by financial regulators to Rep. Park Seong-hoon of the People Power Party, a member of the National Assembly's National Policy Committee. Of that, 305.03 billion won was actually spent, an execution rate of 69.6%.
Woori Bank had the lowest rate among the 20 at 53.8%, spending 42.33 billion won of its 78.66 billion won budget. KB Kookmin Bank, which recently confirmed a data leak from a hacking incident involving an artificial intelligence agent, came in at 58.1%, spending 39.30 billion won of 67.61 billion won. Hanwha Life Insurance was also at 58.1% and Suhyup Bank at 60.7%.
Seven of the 20 firms reduced their information security budgets this year from last year. Woori Bank set aside 61.57 billion won, down 21.7% from 78.66 billion won a year earlier. Citibank Korea cut its budget 18.0% to 7.30 billion won from 8.90 billion won, and Shinhan Bank cut 10.4% to 40.59 billion won from 45.29 billion won.
Hanwha Life Insurance (down 2.8%), the Korea Development Bank (down 2.2%), K bank (down 1.7%) and Standard Chartered Bank Korea (down 0.9%) also trimmed this year's information security budgets from last year.
"Rather than rolling out belated measures every time an incident occurs, regulators should examine the state of security investment and hold accountable those firms where negligence is confirmed," Park said.