Seoul: South Korea's privacy watchdog announced that it has fined the Korean units of luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany a total of 36 billion won (US$24.9 million) due to customer data leaks.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the Personal Information Protection Commission reached this decision during a plenary meeting, imposing a fine of 21.4 billion won on Louis Vuitton Korea, the largest among the three companies, due to a data breach affecting approximately 3.6 million customers. The breach occurred through an external hacker who infiltrated an employee's device using malicious code. The commission highlighted the company's inadequate security measures, including the lack of proper safety protocols for remote logins.
Christian Dior Couture Korea and Tiffany Korea were fined 12.2 billion won and 2.4 billion won, respectively, for data breaches caused by employees being deceived into granting internal system access to malicious actors. Dior experienced a breach impacting around 1.95 million users and remained unaware of the incident for three months. In contrast, the breach at Tiffany involved the personal information of roughly 4,600 users, as stated by the watchdog.