Epson Korea says cyber attack affects 350,000 customers

Sat Aug 20, 2011 5:20am EDT

SEOUL Aug 20 (Reuters) - Epson Korea Co., Ltd. on Saturday hackers had breached the personal data of its 350,000 registered customers last week, the latest in a series of cyber attacks involving a huge number of victims in the country.

An official at the South Korean affiliate of Seiko Epson Corp. said the company has reported the case to the communications regulator. It said personal information, including phone numbers, e-mail addresses, names and coded data of customers registered on its website had been compromised.

“We are still investigating the case and tracking down the attackers,” said the official, who declined to be named.

South Korea has recently drawn up an intensive cyber security master plan after a wave of hacking attacks against its government agencies, companies and financial firms exposed the vulnerabilities of networks in the world’s most wired country.

Late last month, hackers who the state-run Korea Communications Commission alleged were from China attacked the Nate Internet portal and the Cyworld blogging site, both run by SK Comms, accessing the personal information of up to 35 million users in the country’s biggest cyber attack so far.

In April, state-funded Nonghyup, a giant commercial bank, suffered a massive network failure that affected millions of customers. Seoul prosecutors at the time blamed North Korean hackers for the incident. The secretive North, still technically at war with the South since a truce pact ended the 1950-53 Korean War, denies the accusation.

(Reporting by Sung-Won Shim, editing by Miral Fahmy)

((Sung-won.shim@thomsonreuters.com)(+822.3704.5649)) Keywords: KOREA HACKING/EPSON

(C) Reuters 2011. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution ofReuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expresslyprohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuterssphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group ofcompanies around the world.

Comments (0)
This discussion is now closed. We welcome comments on our articles for a limited period after their publication.