Scandal around Coupang: Data leak affecting 33.7 million users
One of South Korea’s largest e-commerce companies, Coupang, has confirmed a large scale leak of personal data that affected 33.7 million users, Qazinform News Agency reports, citing Yonhap.
According to Coupang, the breach exposed key customer information including names, phone numbers, email addresses and delivery addresses. The company stated that payment details, bank card information and login credentials were not affected.
In an official statement, the company said that unauthorized access to delivery related personal information was first carried out through overseas servers starting from June 24.
Coupang detected the incident on November 18 and notified the authorities within two days, initially reporting damage to 4,500 customers. However, the investigation later revealed that the scale of the leak was significantly larger and might have continued for several months.
On Sunday, the government of the Republic of Korea held an emergency meeting with relevant ministries chaired by Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon and announced a full-scale investigation.
The minister said that the government received a report on the leak on November 19 and launched a probe the following day. He noted that an unidentified attacker exploited a vulnerability in Coupang’s server verification system, which allowed access to the data of more than 30 million users.
Bae Kyung-hoon added that a joint public private task force is conducting a comprehensive investigation, developing measures to prevent further damage and examining whether Coupang violated data protection regulations.
According to informed sources, law enforcement identified a suspect, a former Chinese employee of the company who has since left the country.
The incident has already been described as the largest in South Korean history, surpassing the SK Telecom data breach in April that affected 23.2 million users and resulted in a record fine of 134.8 billion won.
On Sunday, Coupang issued a public apology. Chief Executive Officer Park Dae jun stressed that the company will make every effort to strengthen digital security and fully cooperate with government authorities.
The Coupang incident follows a series of large-scale cybersecurity breaches affecting millions of users worldwide. Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that Google had confirmed a massive Gmail data leak that exposed information connected to up to 2.5 billion accounts.
