Korea interior ministry convenes 300 IT officials to tighten security against AI hacking

South Korea's interior ministry convened about 300 government and public-sector IT officials in Sejong on Wednesday to share measures against a rising tide of hacking carried out with artificial intelligence, along with plans to harden the security of the shared government cloud. The meeting was organized to review the cyber response system and strengthen the operational stability and security of the public-private cloud as concern over AI-enabled attacks grows.

The National Information Resources Service hosted the 2026 consultative meeting for the ministries and public institutions whose systems it hosts. Participants included information officers from central ministries and public bodies as well as officials from the agency itself.

The agency said it would widen checks for web vulnerabilities across administrative networks and shared emergency measures for flaws that are found. It also set out a plan to reorganize security services for the shared public-private cloud into a centralized model, creating a two-tier system for monitoring, detection and response, and to move to an integrated managed service provider arrangement to tighten management.

On resilience, the agency reported progress in building a disaster recovery system meant to keep core national systems running without interruption, and briefed the institutions on what they must observe under stability rules for government and public information systems enacted in April. It also described the shift to cloud-native operations and the criteria and support policies for moving services to private clouds.

A question-and-answer session gave the institutional officials time to raise issues they had submitted in advance.

"With AI hacking threats becoming a reality, a government-wide response to strengthen security is more important than ever," said Ha Seung-cheol, head of the National Information Resources Service. He asked the hosted institutions for "active cooperation and support" in securing the reliability of government services, including the disaster recovery build-out and the cloud-native transition.