Infostealer statistics · South Korea · October 2026
88.5% of the 52 large South Korean organisations in the Ransomnews panel have employee credentials in stealer logs in the October 2026 snapshot, against 89.4% across all 36 countries. The median organisation in South Korea has 26.5 such credentials in circulation (31 panel-wide), 351 were captured in the 30 days before the snapshot, and 48.1% of organisations gained at least one. South Korea ranks 21st of 36 countries by the share of organisations exposed and 20th by credentials per organisation.
How large South Korean organisations compare with the rest of the panel
Large South Korean organisations are about as exposed as the panel as a whole: 88.5% of them have at least one employee credential captured by infostealer malware, against 89.4% across the panel, and the median organisation carries 26.5 credentials against 31. The distribution is long-tailed: 6 organisations have no employee credentials in the index, 14 have a hundred or more and 1 has a thousand or more. 16 organisations gained new credentials in the final seven days before the snapshot.
Lifetime totals accumulate over years of captures; the 30-day and 7-day figures are the measure of current activity. A stealer-log record is produced on an infected device, usually a personal or unmanaged machine where an employee saved work passwords in the browser; it means that credential is in criminal hands, not that the organisation’s own systems were breached.
Which sectors in South Korea are most exposed?
The most exposed sector in South Korea is Universities, with 100.0% of 8 organisations exposed and a median of 315 employee credentials; the least exposed is Banking and finance, at 66.7% of 6 and a median of 17. Sectors with only a handful of organisations in the national panel are listed but should be read with care.
| Sector | Organisations | Hit rate | Median per org | Employee credentials | New in 30 days | Gained new in 30 days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Universities | 8 | 100.0% | 315 | 2,773 | 168 | 100.0% |
| Consumer goods | 1 | 100.0% | 166 | 166 | 5 | 100.0% |
| E-commerce | 1 | 100.0% | 82 | 82 | 1 | 100.0% |
| Gaming | 4 | 100.0% | 53 | 228 | 7 | 50.0% |
| Automotive | 2 | 100.0% | 47 | 94 | 2 | 50.0% |
| Utilities | 1 | 100.0% | 41 | 41 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Technology | 4 | 100.0% | 39 | 2,175 | 125 | 50.0% |
| Telecoms | 3 | 100.0% | 19 | 114 | 7 | 66.7% |
| Media | 4 | 100.0% | 18 | 72 | 2 | 25.0% |
| Airlines and transport | 3 | 100.0% | 18 | 259 | 17 | 66.7% |
| Healthcare | 1 | 100.0% | 13 | 13 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Government | 8 | 87.5% | 21.5 | 770 | 13 | 37.5% |
| Industrial | 3 | 66.7% | 62 | 187 | 4 | 66.7% |
| Banking and finance | 6 | 66.7% | 17 | 126 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Pharmaceuticals | 2 | 50.0% | 2 | 4 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Retail | 1 | 0.0% | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
Hit rate: share of organisations with at least one employee credential in stealer logs. Consumer mailbox hosts are excluded from employee figures. Source: Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, October 2026.
Which South Korean companies have the most employee logins in stealer logs?
samsung.com (2,090), koreanair.com (234) and cj.net (166) carry the most employee credentials in the index among the companies measured in South Korea. Per-organisation figures are published for companies only; government, university and health bodies in the panel are reported in the aggregates above. The counts are logins captured from infected devices on which staff had saved their work passwords, not evidence that the company’s own systems were breached; a company with a large workforce and many contractors accumulates more of them for the same infection rate.
| Company | Sector | Employee credentials | New in 30 days | Customer logins | Session cookies | Third-party services |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| samsung.com | Technology | 2,090 | 124 | 889,502 | 7,714,383 | 48 |
| koreanair.com | Airlines and transport | 234 | 16 | 7,739 | 19,199 | 8 |
| cj.net | Consumer goods | 166 | 5 | 682 | 965 | 9 |
| doosan.com | Industrial | 125 | 3 | 340 | 287 | 11 |
| nexon.com | Gaming | 102 | 3 | 90,542 | 311,406 | 3 |
| coupang.com | E-commerce | 82 | 1 | 37,356 | 519,977 | 8 |
| kt.com | Telecoms | 81 | 3 | 7,471 | 52,259 | 1 |
| hyundai.com | Automotive | 71 | 2 | 6,195 | 102,978 | 6 |
| netmarble.com | Gaming | 64 | 0 | 21,039 | 94,840 | 4 |
| shinhan.com | Banking and finance | 63 | 0 | 1,174 | 3,118 | 0 |
| hanwha.com | Industrial | 62 | 1 | 122 | 2,361 | 7 |
| lg.com | Technology | 54 | 1 | 43,115 | 769,806 | 0 |
| ncsoft.com | Gaming | 42 | 4 | 45,592 | 34,474 | 3 |
| kepco.co.kr | Utilities | 41 | 0 | 3,662 | 3,671 | 2 |
| kbs.co.kr | Media | 34 | 0 | 1,703 | 18,111 | 0 |
| ibk.co.kr | Banking and finance | 29 | 0 | 1,215 | 13,570 | 1 |
| kakaocorp.com | Technology | 24 | 0 | 28 | 32,220 | 2 |
| chosun.com | Media | 23 | 2 | 819 | 56,730 | 1 |
| kia.com | Automotive | 23 | 0 | 6,278 | 115,355 | 0 |
| wooribank.com | Banking and finance | 22 | 0 | 5,453 | 10,236 | 0 |
| krafton.com | Gaming | 20 | 0 | 25,704 | 102,354 | 4 |
| sktelecom.com | Telecoms | 19 | 4 | 495 | 494 | 4 |
| flyasiana.com | Airlines and transport | 18 | 0 | 4,623 | 11,117 | 1 |
| uplus.co.kr | Telecoms | 14 | 0 | 5,279 | 1,881 | 0 |
| yna.co.kr | Media | 13 | 0 | 39 | 56,362 | 0 |
| kbstar.com | Banking and finance | 12 | 0 | 6,017 | 10,054 | 0 |
| korail.com | Airlines and transport | 7 | 1 | 1,047 | 1,361 | 0 |
| skhynix.com | Technology | 7 | 0 | 891 | 620 | 0 |
| celltrion.com | Pharmaceuticals | 4 | 0 | 29 | 24 | 0 |
| joongang.co.kr | Media | 2 | 0 | 134 | 52,608 | 0 |
| hanabank.com | Banking and finance | 0 | 0 | 102 | 1,134 | 0 |
| lotte.co.kr | Retail | 0 | 0 | 197 | 94 | 0 |
| nhbank.com | Banking and finance | 0 | 0 | 0 | 15 | 0 |
| posco.co.kr | Industrial | 0 | 0 | 150 | 27 | 0 |
| samsungbiologics.com | Pharmaceuticals | 0 | 0 | 3 | 151 | 0 |
| naver.com * | Technology | n/a | n/a | 141,992 | 5,437,748 | n/a |
Companies in the panel in South Korea, up to 40, by employee credentials in stealer logs. * hosts consumer mailboxes, so employee figures are withheld. Customer logins are credentials captured on the company's own login pages. Source: Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, October 2026.
What do the stolen employee logins open?
A stealer takes every password saved on the infected machine, so the log that holds an employee’s email login usually holds their logins to the organisation’s cloud services too. Across the 29 organisations in South Korea with such records, the services most often captured alongside a work email address are Zoom, Adobe Experience Cloud and Autodesk Construction Cloud. By category, Video Conferencing (39.6%), Marketing & Creative (10.6%) and Construction & Design (10.2%) lead.
Third-party services, by captured logins
By category
| Category | Logins | Organisations | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Video Conferencing | 1,338 | 15 | 39.6% |
| Marketing & Creative | 357 | 16 | 10.6% |
| Construction & Design | 343 | 14 | 10.2% |
| Productivity & Notes | 202 | 11 | 6.0% |
| Cloud Storage | 153 | 13 | 4.5% |
| AI Models & APIs | 140 | 13 | 4.1% |
| CRM | 136 | 5 | 4.0% |
| Team Chat | 105 | 14 | 3.1% |
| Source Control & DevOps | 61 | 8 | 1.8% |
| Cloud Infrastructure | 47 | 9 | 1.4% |
| Developer Tools & IDE | 36 | 7 | 1.1% |
| e-Signature & Contract Management | 36 | 3 | 1.1% |
Service counts are summed from each organisation’s 25 largest services; categories are the index’s own labels, lightly consolidated. An identity-provider login (Okta, Entra, Ping) is the most dangerous record in this table: it opens every application behind the organisation’s single sign-on, and the stealer usually captures the session cookie next to it.
How to use these figures
Check your own domain with Stealercheck, which returns the same lifetime, 30-day and 7-day counts, and compare the result with the median above (26.5 for large South Korean organisations). For every exposed account: reset the password, revoke active sessions so stolen cookies stop working, re-enrol MFA and find the infected device. Then block browser password saving for work accounts in favour of a managed password manager and shorten session lifetimes on single sign-on. The controls that stop the infection itself are in our guide to ransomware protection for business.
Frequently asked questions
How many large South Korean organisations have employee passwords in stealer logs?
88.5% of the 52 large South Korean organisations measured in the October 2026 snapshot have at least one employee credential captured by infostealer malware, with a median of 26.5 per organisation; 351 new employee credentials were indexed in the 30 days before the snapshot and 48.1% of organisations gained at least one.
Which sector in South Korea is most exposed to infostealers?
Universities: 100.0% of the 8 organisations measured have employee credentials in stealer logs, with a median of 315 per organisation. Banking and finance is the least exposed at 66.7%.
Which services do stolen South Korean employee logins open?
The third-party services most often captured alongside work email logins in South Korea are Zoom, Adobe Experience Cloud and Autodesk Construction Cloud; by category, Video Conferencing (39.6%), Marketing & Creative (10.6%) and Construction & Design (10.2%) lead. An identity-provider login opens everything behind single sign-on and should be treated as an incident on its own.
Where do these South Korean figures come from?
From the Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset: a monthly query of the Alerts.bar stealer-log index for a fixed panel of 1,874 organisation domains in 36 countries, of which 53 are large South Korean organisations. Only aggregate counts are stored; no credential or personal record is kept or shown. The index is operated by the same group as Ransomnews. Cite as Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, with a link to this page.
More infostealer statistics
- Infostealer statistics: families, countries and sectors
- Stealercheck: check any domain against the same index
- Ransomware statistics: confirmed attacks by month
By country
- Australia91.2%
- Austria90.7%
- Belgium90.5%
- Brazil95.1%
- Canada91.5%
- Czechia81.6%
- Denmark84.8%
- Estonia67.7%
- Finland86.7%
- France94.5%
- Germany92.7%
- India94.2%
- Ireland80.0%
- Israel93.8%
- Italy91.3%
- Japan82.1%
- Latvia72.4%
- Lithuania72.9%
- Mexico92.7%
- Netherlands87.0%
- Nigeria87.8%
- Norway85.0%
- Poland93.2%
- Portugal94.3%
- Saudi Arabia97.5%
- Singapore82.6%
- South Africa96.7%
- South Korea88.5%
- Spain95.7%
- Sweden79.6%
- Switzerland93.5%
- Turkey97.9%
- Ukraine78.6%
- United Arab Emirates84.8%
- United Kingdom90.4%
- United States98.6%
By sector
- Airlines and transport95.6%
- Automotive82.1%
- Banking and finance88.7%
- Consumer goods81.7%
- Defence and aerospace89.5%
- E-commerce96.2%
- Gaming94.1%
- Government76.3%
- Healthcare95.8%
- Industrial87.1%
- Insurance85.4%
- Logistics and post91.2%
- Media97.8%
- Mining93.3%
- Oil, gas and energy92.5%
- Pharmaceuticals94.3%
- Retail78.0%
- Technology94.1%
- Telecoms89.4%
- Universities99.3%
- Utilities94.7%
Method. Figures come from the October 2026 snapshot of the Alerts.bar infostealer index, taken for a fixed panel of 1,874 organisation domains in 36 countries and stored by Ransomnews; the panel is held constant so that month-on-month change reflects the threat rather than the sample. Employee credentials are stealer-log records whose username is an address on the organisation’s domain (university figures include students); customer logins are credentials captured on the organisation’s own login pages; session cookies are authentication cookies harvested from infected browsers. The index reports a floor of 1 on lifetime counters, which we record as 0, and domains that host consumer mailboxes are excluded from employee figures. Full methodology and the public API: infostealer statistics. Cite as: Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, ransomnews.com.