Seoul: Science Minister Bae Kyung-hoon on Tuesday reaffirmed that a recent data leak at Coupang Inc. affected 33 million customers in South Korea, noting the U.S. commerce giant had "malicious intent" in its unilateral release of its own assessment report that claimed significantly less damage last week.
According to Yonhap News Agency, the joint government-private sector investigation, including the Personal Information Protection Commission and the police, revealed that the names and email addresses of more than 33 million users were leaked. Bae made these remarks during a parliamentary session, countering Coupang's claim from the previous week that data from only about 3,000 accounts had actually been downloaded and later deleted by the suspect.
Bae strongly disagreed with Coupang's assertion, stating that details such as users' addresses and order information were also believed to have been leaked. He expressed grave concern toward Coupang for issuing an announcement that had not been coordinated with the government, accusing the company of having extremely malicious intent.
The minister highlighted that the suspect accessed Coupang's servers and freely viewed and downloaded users' information. He also mentioned that the laptop submitted by Coupang, owned by a former employee suspected to be behind the leak, does not prove that only 3,000 accounts were compromised. Bae suggested that the suspect could have uploaded the information to a cloud server rather than saving it on a laptop or desktop computer, necessitating further analysis.