SEOUL, June 11 (Reuters) – South Korea will fine e-commerce giant Coupang 625 billion won ($409.30 million) over a massive leak of customer information last year and illegal collection of personal information, in \u200cthe country’s largest data breach penalty on a company.<\/p>\n
The Personal Information Protection Commission said the New \u200cYork-listed company had leaked personal data of more than 33 million customers and failed to detect the breach within the 72 hours required \u200bby the law.<\/p>\n
The fine amounts to 1.4% of Coupang’s revenue of 45 trillion won in 2025, according to Reuters’ calculation.<\/p>\n
“This accident occurred due to Coupang’s lack of safety measures and systems, not sophisticated hacking,” Song Kyung-hee, the chairperson of the privacy regulator, told a briefing on Thursday.<\/p>\n
After the fine was announced, Coupang apologised for having caused concern to \u200cthe public and its customers.<\/p>\n
However, the company \u2060said that “we regret that our proactive measures to prevent secondary harm from last year’s data leak incident, as well as our explanations based on clear facts, were not sufficiently \u2060reflected” in the regulator’s decision.<\/p>\n
Seattle-based Coupang generates most of its revenue in South Korea, offering fast delivery of groceries, food and other goods.<\/p>\n
The penalty followed a finding by a government-led investigation earlier this year that blamed the breach on management \u200bfailure.<\/p>\n
South \u200bKorea’s science ministry at the time said that a former \u200bemployee, who was a Chinese national, stole a \u200csecurity key and gained unauthorised access to customer accounts.<\/p>\n
Song said Coupang’s security system allowed a hacker to easily access the personal information of all of its customers, even after the suspect left the company.<\/p>\n
The firm also failed to detect an unusual increase in traffic to its customer data until it was alerted by a customer’s inquiry, she added.<\/p>\n
Separately, the regulator found the company’s marketing program illegally collected information on online activities of around 11 \u200cmillion customers without their agreement, Song said.<\/p>\n
Probes into the data breach \u200badded to trade friction with Washington amid concerns Korean authorities had \u200bgone too far in their treatment of the \u200bU.S.-listed company, while the allies have been negotiating details on a trade deal struck \u200clast year.<\/p>\n
South Korea said, however, its Coupang probe \u200bwas neither a trade nor \u200bsecurity issue and should be handled separately from the ongoing talks with Washington.<\/p>\n
The firm is estimated to control about 40% of South Korea’s logistics services, the largest market share among peers, according to Seoul-based \u200bIM Securities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL, June 11 (Reuters) – South Korea will fine e-commerce giant Coupang 625 billion won ($409.30 million) over…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[426,28443,28444,4104,31,28445,9909,33],"class_list":["post-48959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-south-korea","tag-coupang","tag-customer-data","tag-customer-information","tag-data-breach","tag-korea","tag-personal-information","tag-personal-information-protection-commission","tag-south-korea"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}