South Korea\'s government is pursuing automatic remote updates alongside USIM replacements after concerns that LGU+\'s International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) directly contains subscriber phone numbers, raising privacy exposure risks. Lawmaker Cho Kyung-tae said LGU+ differs from SK Telecom and KT in how it generates IMSI and said only about 30 percent of users have replaced USIM cards. Vice Prime Minister Bae Kyung-hoon said the remote update is due to start on Oct. 20.

A joint public-private investigation team has spent the past 500 days probing cyber breaches that hit South Korea’s telecommunications and broadcasting industry. Its investigations covered SK Telecom’s USIM hacking incident, KT’s illegal femtocell-linked case and Tving’s account information leak, and it was also deployed to a Coupang breach. The team found repeated shortcomings in basic security practices such as account and authentication management, log retention and abnormal-sign detection, and identified cases of late or missing incident reporting.