South Korea’s personal data breaches are arriving in clusters. Disclosures dated November 14 alone covered the Korea Federation of SMEs’ Yellow Umbrella retirement fund for small-business owners, where names and partial resident registration numbers may have leaked from a membership of 1.92 million, Inje University, where 24,011 records including student and staff numbers, emails and mobile numbers were found to have leaked, and the Korea Minting and Security Printing Corporation’s chak gift certificate platform, where unauthorized access exposed about 3,000 users.
The deeper problem is who else was hit. The Financial Security Institute, the financial sector’s dedicated security body, was hacked on November 9, with an estimated 130 files from 48 financial companies taken from an evaluation site, and Kakao’s KakaoWork business messenger was attacked the same day. The crypto exchange Coinone said on November 15 that customer data left in consultations, including names, account numbers, passwords and wallet addresses, leaked through MetaM, its outsourced consultation firm, and the science ministry has formed a public-private joint investigation team into last month’s intrusion at Douzone Bizon, the country’s largest enterprise software supplier, whose client institutions are still being notified of possible leaks.