South Korean police yesterday raided the Seoul headquarters of e-commerce giant Coupang over a recent data leak believed to have affected almost two-thirds of the nation’s population.
Coupang is South Korea’s most popular online shopping platform, serving millions of customers with lightning-fast deliveries of products from groceries to gadgets.
However, the company suffered a massive data leak this year and was forced to alert customers that their names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, shipping addresses and some order histories had been exposed.
Photo: AFP
Payment details and login credentials were not affected, it said.
Coupang had told authorities the personal information of 33.7 million customers had been leaked — almost two-thirds of the population of the country.
Police in Seoul yesterday conducted a “search and seizure” operation at Coupang’s South Korean headquarters, describing it as a “necessary measure” in its investigation into the leak.
Seventeen officers from the force’s cyberinvestigation unit were deployed, with law enforcement vowing to “comprehensively investigate” based on the evidence obtained.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung last week called for swift action to penalize those responsible for the debacle.
Seoul has said the leak took place through Coupang’s overseas servers from June 24 to Nov. 8.
The company only became aware of it last month, according to police and local media, when it issued a complaint against the alleged culprit — a former employee who is a Chinese national.
The suspect is yet to be apprehended.
Coupang is now facing a class action lawsuit in the US, where its global headquarters is based, over the leak.
South Korea’s presidential office on Monday said that the firm needed to provide answers over how it would compensate users who have had data stolen.
“Coupang must present clear measures outlining how it will take responsibility if damages occur,” presidential chief of staff Kang Hoon-sik said, according to Yonhap.
The case follows a major breach at South Korea’s largest mobile carrier SK Telecom, which was fined 134 billion won (US$91 million) in August after a cyberattack exposed data on nearly 27 million users.
South Korea, among the world’s most wired countries, has also been a target of hacking by arch-rival North Korea.
Police last year announced that North Korean hackers were behind the theft of sensitive data from a South Korean court computer network — including individuals’ financial records— over a two-year period.
Yonhap last month reported that South Korean authorities suspected a North Korean hacking group might be behind the recent cyberattack on cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, which led to the unauthorized withdrawal of 44.5 billion won in digital assets.
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