The loan form was the row

The tool is the part people will over-read. The form fields are the part that already left.

GovInfoSecurity, citing The Korea Herald and a Thursday post from Genians, says police are examining theft of customer data from multiple financial firms, and that servers believed to have been used carried a marker for Artex, a freely available Chinese-language AI penetration-testing tool. I am not publishing the marker. The campaign, in that account, runs from about 27 September through 1 October. The Herald’s rollup is personal information for about 66,000 people and 2,200 corporate records, across seven firms. That rollup is not the same thing as each bank’s own count.

Shinhan Bank said information on 25,729 customers was taken from loan-application files: name, phone number, income. Hana Bank said 89 customers: name, a personal ID, phone, and not financial information, per Yonhap. Yegaram Savings Bank is reported at 40,000 customers. KB Kookmin, Welcome Savings Bank, and Hyundai Capital are also named as victims in the reporting. NH NongHyup and Woori were reportedly targeted and have not confirmed a breach. A target list is not a loss list.

What “AI did it” will replace

It will replace the question of which application held the loan form. An AI pentest tool is a way to drive an ordinary attack faster. It does not invent a credit file that was not on a server, and it does not mean every bank on a slide lost the same columns. Shinhan’s sentence is income and a phone number on a loan application. Hana’s sentence is an ID and a phone, without the money. Those are different incidents that happen to share a week and, investigators think, a tool.

If you are one of the 25,729, assume a loan application’s worth of contact and income data is in someone else’s hands, and treat a call that already knows the income figure as the incident. If you bank at an institution that has only been described as targeted, wait for that institution’s number. Do not brief seven banks off a police inquiry that two of them have not joined.

The tool explains the speed. The row explains the harm. Only one of those fits in a letter to a customer.