Case Study: Korea Telecom achieves real-time SMS spam blocking with Altibase

Korea Telecom replaced Oracle with Altibase for its SMS spam blocking system so that it could detect and block spam in real time

Korea Telecom (KT), South Korea’s largest telecommunications provider with over 40 million users, faced escalating SMS spam and smishing threats that its Oracle-based legacy spam-filtering system could not handle. The old solution relied on predefined keywords and numbers, missed evolving attacks, sometimes blocked legitimate messages, and lacked the sub‑one‑second, low-latency performance KT required for real-time detection.

Since 2009 KT replaced Oracle with Altibase, deploying Altibase’s in-memory database for its SMS spam blocking system. Altibase cut detection time from 3 seconds to 0.2 seconds, enabling real-time identification of smishing and other advanced spam techniques and proactively protecting customers from inadvertent disclosure of personal information.

Korea Telecom