SK Telecom Launches Illegal Spam Response TF... "Collaboration Among 3 Major Carriers and Reporting Guidance"

Mobilizing Company-wide Capabilities to Solve Social Issues
Strengthening Text Message Filtering Features
Advancing Technology and Establishing Cybercrime Countermeasures

SK Telecom announced on the 10th that it has established a company-wide dedicated task force (TF) to minimize customer damage caused by illegal spam messages.

Recently, criminal organizations have been cleverly changing the form of illegal spam messages to cause harm. In particular, illegal spam has become a social issue as they bypass regulations on mass message senders such as resellers and send spam in large quantities.

Accordingly, SKT has decided to mobilize its entire capabilities to strengthen cooperation with related organizations and businesses involved in responding to illegal spam and to participate more actively in government-level discussions.

The TF, consisting of employees from related departments, has been launched to block illegal spam. SKT plans to strengthen its own efforts to suppress illegal spam and establish effective measures through cooperation with the government.

SKT has significantly strengthened filtering standards by shortening the filtering policy update time for sent and received messages from once a day to once every 10 minutes and by making the registration criteria for illegal spam sending numbers stricter.

Additionally, since last month, SKT has actively expanded the spam filtering service function provided in its own authentication service application, PASS.

PASS spam filtering offers basic functions to monitor and filter illegal spam messages, along with features such as 'keyword recommendation' and 'bait message AI detection notification service.' With the consent of mobile phone users, it enables more in-depth spam filtering compared to carrier-based filtering.

The TF will strive to advance the technology necessary to detect and block illegal spam and establish a system capable of organically responding to cybercrime. Since suspected illegal spam line numbers are identified based on cooperation with the government and investigative agencies or customer reports, SKT is strengthening guidance so that customers can report through the Korea Internet & Security Agency.

At the same time, SKT plans to strengthen post-response efforts and illegal spam countermeasures by establishing a cooperation system among the three major carriers, mutually benchmarking illegal spam classification standards and each company's spam blocking solutions.

Meanwhile, in line with the launch of this TF, SKT will strengthen management by directly restricting sending when message brokers send excessive illegal spam messages. This is intended to suppress illegal spam sending based on the obligations and compliance requirements in the terms of use with message brokers using SKT’s Biz Messaging service.

This policy is expected to serve as a strong warning to some message brokers who send illegal spam messages and is anticipated to be an opportunity for the message brokerage industry to make self-regulatory efforts. SKT has delivered an official letter stating this policy to all message brokers in Korea and plans to reflect it in the management supervision policy once detailed consultations, including action standards, are completed.

Son Young-gyu, head of information security at SKT, stated, “SKT will do its best to minimize customer inconvenience through continuous efforts to block illegal spam and to establish a safe communication service usage environment.”