By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
Police are investigating how two compact discs (CDs), storing the private information of more than 11 million people, including high-profile politicians and government ministers, ended up in garbage pile in southern Seoul.
GS-Caltex admitted Friday that the information on the CDs was part of its customer database and said that it reported this to police immediately after it found out about the leak.
The country’s defense minister, police chief, No.2 spy agency official and National Assembly speaker were just a few names among the 11.19 million plus contained on the CDs, a number nearly equivalent of South Korea’s entire adult population.
The CDs contained resident registration numbers, home addresses, addresses of companies, phone numbers, and in some cases, mobile-phone number and e-mail accounts, making it obviously the country’s worst security breach ever.
The massive amount of private information was saved in 76 Microsoft Excel files, which were stored under a file named ``Customer List of GS Caltex.’’
The National Police Agency has dispatched investigators to the southern Seoul headquarters of GS Caltex, the country’s second-largest oil refinery, to determine whether the data on the CDs were leaked from company files.
However, the company, which had been pushing its own internal investigation since late Thursday, admitted that one of its employees was likely to have leaked the data on the CDs.
Talking to reporters, a GS Caltex executive said the content on the CDs was mostly consistent with the information stored on the company’s customer database, which keeps personal information on about 12 million people.
``We have concluded our investigation on about 60 to 70 percent of the names and personal information on the discs, and so far, the data is nearly a complete match with the information kept on the company database,’’ said Na Ju-wan, the director of sales at GS Caltex.
The country has recently seen a slew of privacy infringement cases, which include Hanarotelecom’s abusing personal information of over six million customers in unlawful marketing schemes.
This had tens of thousands of consumers joining class action lawsuits against the broadband Internet carrier, seeking about one million won per head in compensation.
The fallout for GS Caltex, which would obviously be worse than any other previous case, might cause irrevocable damage to the company. GS Caltex executives are now preparing for the worst.
GS Caltex Vice President Kim Myung-hwan tried to downplay the significance of the leak.
``We don’t keep the financial information of our customers, including bank account numbers and credit card information in our database so even if somebody had access to the information on the CDs, they wouldn’t be able to cause any damage with just that,’’ said Kim, adding that the company was not informed of the security leak or been on the receiving end of a blackmail attempt regarding the customer information.
``Aside of the resident registration numbers, the CDs didn’t have anything that cannot already be found on the Internet,’’ he said. Critics say this is stretching the truth since resident registration numbers are the Korean equivalent of social security codes.
GS Caltex claims to employ a strict policy regarding the protection of customer information. Only 12 employees are authorized to access the customer information database, according to a company spokesman.
The names on the CDs were arranged by birth date, based on the resident registration numbers, a 13-digit code including date of birth, sex and registration site, containing private information of people from their early teens to late 60s.
The CDs were recently found by a pedestrian who picked them up at a garbage dump in a leisure district in southern Seoul.
Lee Sang-hee, minister of defense; Won Se-hoon, minister of public administration and safety; Eo Cheong-soo, commissioner general of the national police agency; and Kim Hoe-seon, deputy director of the National Intelligence Service had their resident registration numbers, home addresses, office addresses and fixed-line phone numbers listed.
Other high-profile bureaucrats included on the CDs were Kim Hyung-oh, National Assembly speaker; Chung Dong-ki, presidential secretary; and Jung Jin-gon, senior secretary for education, science and culture.
Also leaked was information on Grand National Party (GNP) lawmakers Na Kyung-won and Koh Seung-duk, and Kwak Jung-sook of the Democratic Labor Party.
thkim@koreatimes.co.kr
