By Kyu-seok Shim and Jack Kim
SEOUL, April 23 (Reuters) – South Korea’s data protection agency said on Thursday it has fined a matchmaking service over the leak of its members’ sensitive personal information, including their weight, blood type and whether they were previously married.
The Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement the company, Duo, failed to implement adequate measures to safeguard their membership database and was slow to take action after its system was hacked last year.
It ordered Duo to pay a 1.21 billion won ($815,400) fine, take corrective action to improve how it handles personal data and to fully disclose details of the incident.
Hackers gained unauthorised access to the company database in January last year and downloaded private personal information of more than 420,000 current and former members. The data also included phone numbers, addresses, schools graduated from and workplaces, it said.
The commission said Duo also violated regulations on the collection and storage of personal data, such as citizenship ID numbers and passwords, and failed to meet a requirement to delete the information of nearly 300,000 members gathered more than five years ago.
Duo is one of South Korea’s best-known matchmaking services, in a country where many have long relied on such services in some form or other to find partners.
The company said in a statement it respected the agency’s findings and “deeply regrets that we failed to adequately protect our members’ personal data.”
It said the breach resulted from a “hacking attack that was extremely difficult to detect or prevent.”
Duo says on its website its services have led to more than 53,000 weddings and seven couples tying the knot on average every day. It had 36,000 members as of this week, the website said.
A number of South Korean companies and online platforms have suffered breaches of customer data as a result of hacking or staff misconduct, prompting a government crackdown following a public outcry.
($1 = 1,483.9000 won)
(Reporting by Jack KimEditing by Ed Davies)
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