Over 5 mil. resident registration number records leaked in Korea over 6 years
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Resident registration numbers were exposed more than 5.05 million times in personal data breach cases that prompted enforcement action by the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) over the past six years, data showed Sunday.
According to an analysis by the office of Rep. Han Chang-min of the Social Democratic Party, 130 cases involving the exposure of resident registration numbers were subject to enforcement action between 2021 and September 2026.
Excluding three cases for which the scale of the breach could not be determined, the remaining cases involved a combined 5.05 million exposures of resident registration numbers.
By institution or company, the National Center for the Rights of the Child accounted for the largest number of resident registration number exposures, with a combined 1.16 million instances across three data breach cases.
It was followed by Yanolja with 1 million, NHN Wetoo with 524,620, Lotte Card with 452,313, Duo Information with 427,464 encrypted records and LG Uplus with 297,117 encrypted records.
Han's office said the analysis was based on data submitted by PIPC and the FSS, as well as publicly available enforcement decisions.
It added that the figure represents the total number of records exposed across individual breach cases, rather than the number of people affected, as the same person's data may have been exposed multiple times.
More than 2.78 million exposures involving connecting information (CI) and duplication information (DI) were also recorded.
CI is generated from a person's resident registration number and functions as an "online resident registration number," allowing the same individual to be identified across different services. DI is used to determine whether the same person has registered for the same website more than once.
There were four breach cases involving CI or DI. Among the cases for which the scale of the breach could be determined, Yanolja accounted for 1 million exposed DI records, Modetour Network for 948,393 CI and DI records and Lotte Card for 836,382 CI records.