An employee of a company that manages school IT equipment in Busan was arrested by police after he siphoned off personal photos and videos from the PCs of 194 female teachers over several years to create and store sexually explicit falsified videos (deepfakes).
The Busan Metropolitan Police Agency's cyber investigation unit said on the 7th that it referred a man in his 30s, identified only as A, to prosecutors in custody on charges including violations of the Information and Communications Network Act.
According to police, from July 2021 to September last year, A is accused of saving 221,921 files, including personal photos and videos, from the PCs of 194 female staff members at 19 schools in Busan to his USB and leaking them, then creating 20 deepfake videos.
During that period, A also illegally filmed under staff members' skirts on 45 occasions, and downloaded and stored child and youth sexual exploitation materials and illegal recordings from pornographic sites. The videos A kept totaled 533 files, amounting to 405 gigabytes (GB).
The police investigation found that, while entering schools for work after being asked to check PCs, A accessed Google Photos and Naver MyBox accounts that had been left logged in when staff stepped away and saved personal photos and videos to his USB.
The crimes came to light when a school official recently found the problematic USB that A had left at the school.
After launching the investigation, police seized and searched A's mobile phone, USBs, external hard drives, and PCs at his home and office and uncovered the crimes through analysis.
However, police said the deepfake materials were not distributed online.
Police recommended that the Busan Metropolitan City Office of Education strengthen information security protections. A police official said, "Because cases of personal information being compromised due to security gaps are occurring, extra caution is needed."