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I've lived in Korea for quite a length of time and my wife is Korean...and I concur that it's a nightmare. No Korean financial institution will let you log into
by ddoolin 13y ago
I've lived in Korea for quite a length of time and my wife is Korean...and I concur that it's a nightmare. No Korean financial institution will let you log into their interfaces on anything other than IE. Often the homepage would be completely broken in anything other than IE anyway. This is true for most sites, though those were easily avoidable. Banks and the like, not so much.
To perform financial transactions online in Korea, you would need a plethora of software (often one from each party you would deal with) that revolved around security certificates that were issued by the banks that would store a hard copy of the certificate locally on your computer. Often it didn't work at all, not even getting into the security implications of the system. Bank hacking is so common in Korea, it's really disturbing. There is absolutely no accountability where the attempts at security do exist.
Also, you need to use your Citizen Number (basically a Social Security Number) to register for ANY service in Korea, even common websites. So everything you do can be traced via that single number. For foreigners, registering for common sites is usually impossible because our alien numbers are stored wherever normal citizen numbers are, so unless the site has a separate process for foreigners, you'd be out of luck. It's quite a mess. I can't say enough bad things.
On the bright side, start ups like Vingle in Seoul are doing a lot of tip the scales for the younger generation by only supporting modern browser versions (IE8+, not the most modern, but definitely a step up from IE6, which has a huge market share still, too), but it's a slow change.
- wahsd 13y agoDoes changing/spoofing the user agent not work?
- kijin 13y agoNope, because non-IE browsers won't run ActiveX controls no matter what the user-agent string is.
- lifthrasiir 13y ago> Also, you need to use your Citizen Number (basically a Social Security Number) to register for ANY service in Korea, even common websites. Since 2011, websites cannot ask or store resident registration numbers (that's the official name) for non-financial purposes. Sadly, it happened after a major incident which exposed RRNs of more than 70% of Koreans. [1] It is a common estimate that every Korean person have his/her RRN hacked at least twice due to frequent incidents. The Korean government endorses i-PIN nowadays, which is basically... uh... redundant aliases to the unique RRN. This is obviously stupid, you can hack i-PIN instead of RRN and you have the same credential. Well, at least i-PIN is random. (RRN had very low entropy, and even shallow information about the target may limit possible RRNs to only hundreds.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number#Online_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_registration_number#O... for the 2011 incident.
- ddoolin 13y agoI'm not sure if that's rigidly enforced. As in, I really do not know. I definitely feel like I've seen it used in non-financial registrations since then but I could be wrong for sure. Just the birthday and sex will severely limit the RRN list, yep. I've once read that public trust in Korea is one of the lowest in the world, but I've found it to be completely the opposite. Public trust is so high that people seem completely oblivious to how insecure their system infrastructures can be.
- beagle3 13y agoThat's really f'd up. Israel has an "ID number" system, which you use when interfacing with e.g. health providers, or when applying to an academic institute. However, it is not assumed to be secret, and any action that would require positive identification will have it done with a physical government issued ID (national ID card, national driver's license, or passport) - knowing the number is not enough. The system is far from perfect - there is a lot of information leakage, but identity theft requires forgery of physical artifacts, and more often than not - appearance in person - so it is not as common as e.g. in the US.