Moon Hyun-seok, a senior official at the Korea Communications
Commission, told The Associated Press that "Smart Sheriff" has been
removed from the Play store, Google's software marketplace, and that
existing users are being asked to switch to other programs.
The government plans to shut down the service to existing users "as soon as possible," he said.
Smart Sheriff's maker, an association of South Korean mobile operators called MOIBA, declined comment.
Smart Sheriff's disappearance is a blow to South Korea's contentious
effort to keep closer tabs on the online lives of its youngest citizens.
Less than a year ago, the government and schools sent letters to
students and parents to encourage them to download Smart Sheriff.
While security was one of the reasons that led to the removal of Smart
Sheriff, the KCC official said the regulator had decided earlier this
year to suspend the app at the end of December. The faster-than-expected
availability of free monitoring apps from private companies prompted
the regulator to remove the app two months sooner than scheduled, he
said.
A law passed in April requires all new smartphones sold to those 18 and
under to be equipped with software which parents can use to snoop on
their kids' social media activity. Smart Sheriff, the most popular of
more than a dozen state-approved apps, was meant to keep children safe
from pornography, bullying and other threats, but experts say its
abysmal security left the door wide open to hackers and put the personal
information of some 380,000 users at risk.
Pulling the plug on Smart Sheriff was "long overdue," said independent
researcher Collin Anderson, who worked with Internet watchdog group
Citizen Lab and German software auditing firm Cure53 to comb through the
app's code.
In a pair of reports published in September, Cure53 described the app's
security as "catastrophic." Citizen Lab, which is based at the
University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, said the problems
could lead to a "mass compromise" of all users.
MOIBA said in response then that the vulnerabilities had been dealt with
in the six weeks preceding publication of the reports. But the
researchers said in new reports published Sunday that the fixes were
mainly cosmetic. Anderson said they were "akin to putting a lock on a
few of the doors but then leaving the keys to the locks outside."
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