Experts say digital products for children have weaker online security. (Photo : Reuters)
Recognizing the gravity of threats against their online infrastructures in the past months, officials from China, Japan and Korea will talk about cyber policies at a meeting scheduled Oct. 21.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei confirmed the three-way talks, which will be held in Beijing.
The talks will seek to "enhance mutual trust and cooperation in cyberspace among the three countries," said the ministry.
The China-Japan-Korea meeting will be the first-ever consultation of the three countries to discuss cybersecurity.
The meeting coincides with the United States' National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), which has been supported by technology giant Microsoft for more than a decade.
The timely meeting follows the cybersecurity issues that plagued the three countries in the past.
Korea has been known as a country with lax internet security, since most online users still use the outdated ActiveX technology when transacting online. Microsoft, the developer of the ActiveX plug-in, admitted that the technology "pose a security risk," saying that users must avoid using ActiveX if their browser will function without them.
ActiveX has opened Korea to hackers, said Lee Min-wha, a professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Internet users in Korea are said to be "trained to click 'yes' to everything," compromising their data security even more.
Meanwhile, Japan experienced the most serious online attack when Yahoo's security was breached in April 2013. The attack was supposed to steal the identities of visitors to its most-trafficked websites.
"The biggest problem, and the biggest ally of cyber attackers aiming at Japan, is the widespread belief that it can't happen here," said William Saito, information technology strategy adviser to the administration's cabinet.
In August 2013, just four months after the attack on Yahoo, Chinese websites with a ".cn" domain name suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which forced several sites to go temporarily offline for over two hours.
With the upcoming three-way talks, the three countries will suggest cyber policies and formulate cyberspace international rules.
