Police said Thursday they have booked a 20-year-old student without physical detention for allegedly hacking into websites and leaking more than 10,000 IDs and passwords of their users online.
   
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said the college freshmen in Seoul spread malicious software on 104 websites in 24 countries between November 2013 and August this year, collecting information from about 280,000 accounts.
   
He published 13,000 of them on his blog and online hacking forums and used some of them to snoop on emails or purchase goods with others' credit cards.
  
The student is also accused of accessing the website of a South Korean state institution with the account of a civil servant he had obtained through his hacking.
   
His main targets were low-security websites such as independently run shopping websites, and the skills he used to hack them included SQL injection, a code injection technique, and cross-site scripting, which injects malicious scripts into websites.
   
The student, who learned the skills from watching YouTube videos and visiting hacking websites, wanted to "be recognized by other hackers," police said.
   
Users are urged to change their IDs and passwords, and check to see if their information is being stored on shared computers to prevent similar mishaps, police said. (Yonhap)