The Internet Meltdown
The launch special of Real Camera sent Korea into an uproar. A decade earlier the internet had still felt like a novelty, but now it had woven itself so deeply into daily life that its sudden collapse threw everything into chaos. Online gaming cafés were the first to feel the blow. With the exception of a few titles, websites refused to load and logins failed across the board. Nearly every game went dark. Among Korean-made online games, only a handful from the Lineage series remained playable. The sole bright spots were titles released by ID Entertainment—StarCraft and World of Warcraft—which continued without interruption. TJ Soft’s games presented an odd picture: Lineage 1 worked, while Lineage 2 did not. Even the affected Lineage 1 servers allowed players already logged in before the crisis to keep playing.
Portal sites and banks fared no better; their networks seized up, halting all transactions. Some convenience stores even found their POS systems frozen, leaving customers unable to make purchases.
“What on earth is happening?”
The most immediate panic, naturally, centered on KT’s Hyehwa branch—the source of the outage—and the Ministry of Information and Communication, formerly the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
“What is KT doing about this?”
“They’re saying it’s a DNS server problem!”
“How long until everything’s back online?”
Minister Jin Dae-je’s voice rose sharply. The blackout had reached his own office, though the phones still worked and basic apps on Android smartphones—ID Talk among them—remained functional. That was how the urgent call from Cheong Wa Dae had come through, demanding an immediate fix.
“Has ID Group made any contact?”
Jin Dae-je’s first instinct was to reach out to ID Group, though he carefully avoided mentioning Yoo Jae-won by name. Even in this closed emergency meeting of vice ministers and bureau chiefs, any leak could trigger unpredictable backlash. In his view, the crisis was ID Group’s responsibility. Network analysts had traced the attack to a variant of the Slammer worm that flooded servers with far more packets than they could handle. The vulnerability exploited by the worm existed in the Android operating system, so only a patch from ID Group could truly resolve it. It was a reasonable conclusion, and it showed that Jin Dae-je—unlike most ministers parachuted into the role—actually understood the technical details.
His background set him apart. After joining IBM as a researcher in the mid-1980s, he had moved to Ilsung Electronics’ semiconductor division in the mid-1990s, where he helped develop the world’s first 16-megabit DRAM. When Ilsung Electronics was acquired by ID Group, a turning point arrived in his career. His expertise would have guaranteed a high-level position at ID Electronics, yet he chose to leave on his own. He later served as an advisor to the National Science and Technology Council under the People’s Government and was appointed Minister of Information and Communication during a minor cabinet reshuffle at the end of 2002. His practical IT experience was therefore extensive. The only question people asked was why someone would accept such a short-term post—less than a year—when the presidential election was scheduled for March. For Jin Dae-je it had been a calculated gamble. He had already found common ground with the Democratic Party’s candidate, Roh Moo-hyun. If Roh won, Jin Dae-je’s position would be secure. The odds had seemed favorable.
“Minister! ID Group just released the patch!”
The broadband division chief, still clutching the phone, raised his voice.
“Is that so? Then tell everyone to install it immediately. And prepare a press release right away—emphasize that this was a vulnerability in the Android operating system.”
Jin Dae-je gave the order without hesitation, yet the chief wore a troubled expression instead of rushing to comply.
“Minister, there’s a complication.”
“What do you mean? What’s the problem?”
Before Jin Dae-je’s irritation could fully surface, his face went pale. The Android company’s press release had just arrived.
- Android Confirms Korean Internet Crisis
- Slammer Worm Variant
- Same Method Used in U.S.-China Cyber Conflict During 9/11
- Patch Released Two Years Ago
The patch had already been available for two years. During the U.S.-China cyber conflict, the world had been in turmoil, yet Korea had escaped unscathed because the malware had targeted American infrastructure. The same worm variant had now resurfaced—stronger than before—and while it was not aimed exclusively at Korea, the country had suffered the heaviest damage. Other nations were experiencing scattered issues, but Korea bore the brunt.
“What do you think is behind this, Chairman?”
“The reason? Simple. Complacency about security. The patch came out two years ago, and no one bothered to install it. Some sites hadn’t even set administrator passwords.”
Yoo Jae-won had been reviewing production progress for Legend League at Firefist Games’ second studio when the crisis hit. He immediately relocated and issued a public notice directing users to install the two-year-old patch, helpfully including direct IP addresses alongside the usual URLs.
“With the internet down, how are people supposed to download the patch?”
Im Myung-han, the PD of Real Camera, had a reasonable question. As someone who enjoyed a wide range of games, including PC titles, he understood enough about online systems to ask.
“Korea’s outage stems from KT’s DNS servers going down. Services still running are either using ID Group’s own DNS or connecting directly via IP address. Manually entering the IP bypasses the problem entirely.”
It was like an Android smartphone address book vanishing—without names, the numbers became meaningless. Yet anyone who remembered both the name and number could still make the call. The underlying communication lines had never failed.
“Wasn’t the patch supposed to apply automatically?”
“Your memory is impressive.”
“Haha, I was in the middle of a game back then. It forced a reboot for the update.”
Yoo Jae-won gave Im Myung-han a thumbs-up. During the 9/11 cyber conflict, personal PCs had been the issue—zombie machines remotely controlled for endless DDoS attacks. That was why ID Group had made updates mandatory for any internet-connected PC. “Ah, but the forced patch only applied to the consumer version of Android OS. For the enterprise edition running on servers, an automatic reboot would have caused far bigger problems. Large-scale systems need careful safeguards before restarting to prevent data loss. A bank server rebooting without backing up memory could trigger enormous financial damage. That’s why the standard practice is to take servers offline at dawn on weekends, back everything up, and then update. Korea simply failed to follow that basic protocol.”
The next day the fallout began.
- Government to Revise Critical Infrastructure Management Guidelines
- Minister Jin Dae-je, KT President Nam Jung-soo Submit Resignations
The crisis had not been the work of a massive state-sponsored hacking group like the one seen in the U.S.-China conflict. It had been a single variant worm that infected KT’s DNS servers. Had the attackers exploited a brand-new vulnerability in server operating systems or database software, responsibility might have fallen on ID Group or IBM. Instead, the flaw had been patched two years earlier; the failure to apply that patch left KT’s president and the Minister of Information and Communication to take the blame.
Jin Dae-je’s misfortune was simply the terrible timing of his appointment. The KT president’s dismissal was a straightforward matter of managerial accountability. The real culprits were the administrators who had neglected basic server maintenance. Jin Dae-je’s only real mistake had been accepting the post at the worst possible moment.
One unexpected beneficiary was Korea’s security industry—most notably Kim Lab, the company behind the V6 vaccine. V6 had once been pre-installed as a default Android app and enjoyed explosive growth, with the media hailing its founder as “the next Yoo Jae-won” and even selecting him as a New Intellectual. After the 9/11 cyber conflict, however, it had been removed from the default lineup for its inadequate response, and sales had plummeted in a market with little security awareness. Then the internet crisis struck. Public criticism of lax security practices sent companies flocking to Kim Lab. Outsourcing security to specialists was far simpler than building internal teams, and any future breach could be blamed on the contractor. Kim Lab quickly launched enterprise services to ride the wave.
Around the same time, inside a luxurious hotel-style guest room, Im Myung-han and his writer were reviewing footage.
“Heh, this is a real dilemma.”
“It really is.”
“We’ve captured far too many good shots today.”
“I don’t know why we ever worried about runtime. We could just string these together and the story would flow perfectly.”
The cameras had been rolling since the moment the Korean internet crisis erupted. While Yoo Jae-won was overseeing the massive new project at Firefist Games, the alarm had sounded. The instant he received it, his entire demeanor changed.
“Look at those fingers move. You can barely see them.”
On the professional monitor, Yoo Jae-won was dissecting the malware he had received through ID Talk. As his fingers flew across the keyboard, lines of code scrolled rapidly across his iWorks notebook screen. Even more astonishing than the speed was the sight of highly encrypted malicious code being decrypted in real time. The core routines had been hidden behind multiple traps, deliberately obfuscated, and wrapped in encryption. Although the worm had not used advanced schemes like AES—favoring speed of propagation instead—the encryption was still formidable. Yet it unraveled in seconds. Experts watching would have been stunned not by the typing speed, but by the decryption velocity. The iWorks notebook, powerful though it was, remained a personal computer with inherent limits. How it achieved such speed was a mystery—unless one knew about cloud computing. ID Group’s vast data centers, constantly upgraded with the latest CPUs and numbering in the dozens across the United States, Europe, and Korea, provided the necessary computational power. The most advanced facility was the one in Coyote City, which received new processors first. To non-experts like Im Myung-han and the writers, however, the dazzling speed of the typing itself was the most captivating sight.
“When our show airs, it’s going to cause a sensation, right?”
“Absolutely. Even though we’re on cable, the reaction will be enormous.”
Im Myung-han and the writer spoke with complete confidence—not because they were making the program, but because the subject matter, Yoo Jae-won and ID Group, exceeded every expectation. Their prediction, however, proved far too modest. The response was not merely strong; it was explosive. And it did not come from Korea alone. The moment the regular broadcast ended, the episode appeared on Timeflex in an international version complete with subtitles in English and multiple other languages. The global impact of the Yoo Jae-won episode of Real Camera was nothing short of worldwide.