Korean Cybercrime Legislations Facing Challenges of Massive Intrusion against Cyber-Security

South Korea has experienced cyber-crimes with a broad range of effects, including cyber-terror against governmental network, hacking into an important financial institution and a social network site with more than thirty thousand subscribers. Notwithstanding the urgent necessity of sophisticated legal mechanism and effective measures to arrest and punish those who commit the cyber-crimes, current legislations dealing with the cyber-crimes have exposed some loopholes. Korea’s Criminal Code has limited provisions penalizing cyber-crimes with relatively loose penalties. As a result, such cyber-crimes as hacking into popular SNS, leaking personal information, and DDos attacks, have been under the applications of specialized laws, including the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection(APICNUIP). Even the APICNUIP have much lenient penalties when it compares to cyber-attacks against government network. Ineffective legal measures to request cooperation from neighboring countries and the lack of consolidated tower to control and coordinate with governmental agencies make matters worse. In order to raise the level of effective legal measures against evolving cyber-crimes, it is necessary to consider the problems and to contribute every effort to have an effective control tower and international cooperative legal foundation.