South Korea's Lee Wants a Government-Wide Cybersecurity Agency After Bank Hacks

South Korean President Lee Jae-myung wants one agency to run the country's cyber defenses. He called for a government-wide cybersecurity body after a run of hacking attacks on financial institutions, Yonhap News Agency reported. Officials were urged to weigh creating a centralized operation to oversee how the country guards its networks.

Lee tied the push to a tougher threat landscape. He said cyberattacks are growing more sophisticated, partly because artificial intelligence is handing attackers better tools, and warned the fallout now reaches national security and the economy, not just individual victims.

The call lands right after a cluster of data breaches at prominent financial names. Mirae Asset Global Investments, crypto exchange Bithumb and Daishin Securities were all recently caught up in breaches, according to Yonhap. That trio spans asset management, digital assets and traditional brokerage, a spread that makes the case for a single coordinating body easier to sell.

Lee has been leaning hard into technology as a national project. Earlier this month he pitched a record-breaking budget aimed at funding AI and new technologies, framing it as a way to lock in future dominance and spread the gains to ordinary people. Cybersecurity would sit alongside that agenda as a defensive counterpart.

South Korea isn't the only target feeling the heat. Russia's emergencies ministry said its mobile app was hit by a massive cyberattack, and Ukraine reported its air raid alert app was hacked after pushing out fake warnings. Seoul's answer, if Lee gets his way, is fewer scattered defenses and one central command.

What comes next is the hard part: turning a presidential nudge into an actual agency with a mandate, a budget and authority over institutions that already run their own security teams. For now, Lee has set the direction. The details, and the pushback, are still ahead.