Hundreds of Thousands of South Koreans Impacted by New Credit Card Breach

The personal details of hundreds of thousands of people in South Korea have been reportedly stolen by hackers. The stolen information has been abused to perform fraudulent transactions.

It’s difficult to say at this point how many people are impacted. Reuters reports that there are 200,000, but South Korean news agency Yonhap says that there are only “more than 100,000.” Each of the news agencies clams to have obtained details of the incident from the country’s Financial Supervisory Service.

The victims are customers of Shinhan, Kookmin, NongHyup credit card firms and the Kwangju Bank. It’s worth noting that it’s not the first time Kookmin and NongHyup are involved in such an incident.

Earlier this year, we learned that the payment card information of 100 million South Koreans was stolen from various companies. Kookmin and NongHyup are among them.

Now, Yonhap reports that the 100,000 (200,000 according to Reuters) credit card records were uncovered during the investigation of an attack on a point-of-sale (POS) company from which cybercriminals stole 3.2 million card usage records.

The hackers reportedly obtained the passwords for OK Cashbag loyalty cards and used the information to make fraudulent withdrawals worth 102 million won ($115,000 / €82,000) from credit cards. This was possible because many people used the same passwords for both types of cards.