> The real number of users is likely considerably higher, the software being installed on pretty much any computer in South Korea.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. Plenty of young people hate this stuff enough that they do all of their banking through their phone and if they absolutely must do it on a pc, they either use an old disused laptop, do it at work, do it at an internet cafe (not that those don't bring risks) or make sure to remove the spyware the second they've completed the task at hand.
I wrote this sentence three months ago. Since then people already pointed out that mobile banking is being used as escape hatch. The question is still: how many people do this? Everyone younger than 30? Or only 80% of them? Or only people who are moderately tech-savvy?
Not a real statistic, but everyone I know in South Korea use their phones for personal banking. Especially people who aren't tech-savvy.
At first it might have been because mobile apps were easier to use than the crap they had to go through on a PC. Nowadays, though, there is no need to compare because mobile is the default choice anyway. Younger people don't even bother trying it on a PC. Older people, on the other hand, skipped the PC era altogether and went straight to smartphones. I don't think my mother has ever done any banking on a PC, but she has a bank app on her phone.
This is also used by some payment processors (probably belongs to banks).
I can relate as I was in Korea some months ago and in order to buy some concert tickets the platform required me to install that shitty thing. I end up not buying the tickets as it was not possible to me to install anything in my corporate machine.
As you said, my friend point out people don't have it installed in their personal computers but use a third party one which brings more insecurity.
> or make sure to remove the spyware the second they've completed the task at hand.
Yup. The problem is that those spywares are not cleanly uninstalled and leave junks on the disk. Some independent developers even created a dedicated tool for removing those "security" software to solve the problem.
Like you're saying, there's tools for that. Google autocompletes "은행 설치" (bank installation) to "은행 설치 프로그램 삭제" (bank installed programs removal) and the very first link immediately is the homepage of the tool you're talking about, so it doesn't require much inside knowledge to use. Of course the majority of people doesn't bother with this but quite a lot of people do. Even if many of those do so for non-security reasons, e.g. gamers who are afraid the crapware will slow their computer down.
This is a bit of an exaggeration. Plenty of young people hate this stuff enough that they do all of their banking through their phone and if they absolutely must do it on a pc, they either use an old disused laptop, do it at work, do it at an internet cafe (not that those don't bring risks) or make sure to remove the spyware the second they've completed the task at hand.