Pierluigi Paganini January 20, 2014

Financial Supervisory Service confirmed that Stolen credit card data of at least 20 million bank and credit card users in South Korea has been leaked.

While US are facing with a series of clamorous data breached against principal retailers, in South Korea an employee of personal credit ratings firm Korea Credit Bureau (KCB) has been arrested accused of one of the greatest data breach.

The man was accused of stealing the data from customers of three credit card firms, he worked for them as a  consultant. The customers’ data information was stolen from the internal servers of KB Kookmin Card, Lotte Card and NH Nonghyup Card. The data breach impacted at least 20 million of users, the figure is impressive if we consider that Korean population is 50M.

Seoul’s financial regulators confirmed the shocking news on Sunday, the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) revealed that stolen card data includes the customers’ names, social security numbers, phone numbers, credit card numbers and expiration dates.

“The credit card firms will cover any financial losses caused to their customers due to the latest accident,” .

The alleged thief sold the stolen data to phone marketing companies, the managers of those firms were also arrested this month.

Despite this data breach appears the biggest one affected South Korea, in the last couple of year many incidents hit Korean firms.

Following a timeline of data breaches occurred in the country:

• An employee of Citibank Korea has stolen personal data of 34,000 customers.
• In 2012, two South Korean hackers have stolen 8.7 million customer data from the servers of KT Corp, the nation’s second-biggest mobile operator.
• In November 2011 hackers stolen data belonging to 13 million users of Korean games developer Nexon.
• In July 2011 personal data from 35 million users of the South’s social networking site, Cyworld, was stolen by hackers.

FSS confirmed that an investigation by authorities is still ongoing.