▲ Lotte Card Co. (Yonhap)

Lotte Card-penalty

Lotte Card given penalty for leaking critical information of 450,000 customers

SEOUL, March 12 (Yonhap) -- Lotte Card Co. has been slapped with a penalty and a fine for leaking resident registration numbers of about 450,000 customers in a hacking incident last year, the state data protection watchdog said Thursday.

The Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said it decided to impose a penalty of 9.62 billion won (US$6.51 million) and a fine of 4.8 million won on Lotte Card during a plenary meeting Wednesday for violating the Personal Information Protection Act.

The PIPC began a probe into Lotte Card in September last year, when it was notified by the Financial Supervisory Service of the massive personal data breach at the credit card company.

The investigation found that the hacking of Lotte Card's online payment system resulted in the leak of personal credit information for about 2.97 million people, including the resident registration numbers of some 450,000.

The company was found to have processed the resident registration numbers beyond the scope permitted by law by recording them in plain text in log files generated during the online payment process. It was also found that the company did not take sufficient encryption measures for the log files.

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