South Korea and Japan hit by wave of AI-enabled hacks

By Splitfeed EditorialLast updated Oct 10, 2026, 16:00 UTC

On October 9, 2026, multiple outlets including Reuters and NBC News reported that South Korea and Japan are experiencing a wave of cyberattacks, with AI tools identified as reducing the technical skill required for criminals to carry out those attacks. The following day, October 10, a separate report from Dealroom noted that South Korea has announced a $3.5 billion plan to develop a frontier AI model of its own. The two stories arrived within roughly 36 hours of each other, placing the same country at the center of both the offensive threat that AI can enable and the national ambition to lead in AI development.

The pairing matters because it captures a tension that many governments are now navigating. AI capabilities do not sit cleanly on one side of the security ledger. The same lowered technical barrier that allows more cybercriminals to operate also, in theory, powers defensive tools and national competitiveness strategies. South Korea's $3.5 billion commitment signals that policymakers there have decided the answer to AI risk is, at least in part, more domestic AI capacity, not less. Whether that logic holds is precisely what is in dispute, and the specifics of who carried out the attacks, what systems were targeted, and how the investment plan is structured remain undetailed in the available reporting.

None of the three camps have published direct reactions to this story yet. The Pro-AI camp would typically argue that incidents like these prove the urgency of democratic nations building their own frontier models, framing South Korea's $3.5 billion plan as exactly the right response to adversarial AI use. The Anti-AI camp would likely point to the hacking surge as evidence that the broad diffusion of AI tools creates systemic dangers that investment in more powerful models cannot simply outpace. The Middle Ground camp would generally call for parallel tracks, robust international coordination on cyber norms alongside carefully governed national AI development programs, arguing that neither pure investment nor pure restriction addresses both problems at once.

The details most worth watching are the structure of South Korea's $3.5 billion plan, including which institutions receive funding and on what timeline, and any attribution findings from the cyberattack investigations. Attribution in particular would clarify whether the threat is primarily state-sponsored, criminal, or some combination, which would significantly shape what policy responses are considered appropriate.