Joon Hyuk Lee, APAC Market Development Director, FIDO Alliance
Last April, the FIDO Korea Working Group announced our initiative to distribute FIDO Security Keys to Korean citizens to help better secure their identities, data and systems while working remotely due to the Coronavirus outbreak. We were able to do this thanks to FIDO Alliance Korea Working Group Deployment & Marketing Sub-Group’s efforts and in-kind sponsorship by FIDO Security Key vendors like TrustKey (previously known as eWBM), AirCuve (Yubico’s local partner) and Octatco. Today, we are happy to share the results of this initiative, which ended with positive impacts and pleasant surprises.
In short, the outcome can be summarized as following:
- The campaign was covered by 15+ local online media, spreading positive awareness of FIDO Authentication
- We reached out to 52 organizations and individuals exposed to greater cyber risk by working at home and distributed 156 FIDO Security Keys
- 70% of them were new relationships that we had not previously had through previous on/offline events (e.g. hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare centers, patent offices, online game developers, ecommerce owners, retail shop owners, architects, hospitality industries, financial institutes, financial investors, school teachers, semiconductor industries, sports video analyst, advertisement agency, etc.)
- 25% of them had potential to be business partners or relying parties
Here are some remarks by recipients of free FIDO Security Keys who agreed to disclose their identities:
“We are a group of 5 university hospitals working together on a suicide prevention project. Securing personal and medical information of these patients are very important, especially when we are working remotely. We hope to try out the FIDO Security Key through this giveaway campaign and find out how to adopt it into our database protection system.” – Mr. Dohyun Kwon, Seoul National University Hospital
“It is a shame but we have been writing passwords on a wall thus far, so we do not have to ask each other when logging into shared computers. It is scary that these passwords can be exposed to others with bad intentions. We have a great hope that FIDO Security Keys would eliminate these worries and even enable architects to work at home while feeling secured and safe.” – Mr. Taehoon Hur, Ruha Architectural Design Firm
“I operate over 10 healthcare and fitness centers in Seoul and always felt uncomfortable about having all these members’ personal information sitting on our computer where any staff with passwords can access it , not to mention some staff with such privileges kept on forgetting these long and hard-to-remember passwords. It would be interesting experiments for us to test out these FIDO Security Keys in practice.” – Ms. Jaehee Yoon, STAR Health Care and Fitness
“We are food product wholesalers mainly doing businesses online. Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, we would have to have our staff work at home with much of our purchasing and customer information in their laptops. Hope our staff would not have to expose the passwords by using these FIDO Security Keys. Thank you!” – Mr. Hoyoon Jung, NongGa Food Products
“WIPS is the number one patent database related services and consulting firm in Korea. We are used to working under Bring Your Own Device environment but have struggled managing passwords. Happy to take part in this experiment program and hope to see positive results.” – Mr. Taewoo Kwon, WIPS
Once again, we truly appreciate the undivided attention and efforts given by all FKWG members on this campaign, and especially recognize TTA (Telecommunications Technology Association) and Dr. Heung Youl Youm, for their extra efforts in the early stage of ideation and promotions.
As Dr. Stephen Oh, the Co-Leader of FKWG Deployment & Marketing Sub-Group said, “It was an amazing experience not just because we have learned a lot from the market where we could not usually reach through conventional approaches, but also it only took less than a month from ideation to full execution.”
