14 DAY TRIAL // A total of 37 South Korean financial company executives have offered to resign following the massive data breach in which an engineer from the Korea Credit Bureau stole and sold the personal and financial details of 20 million cardholders.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the KCB engineer is said to have stolen the details of 104 million cards issued by the NongHyup Financial Group, Lotte Card, and the KB Financial Group. The man, whose company was hired by the financial firms, sold the information to marketing companies.
The suspect stole email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and resident registration numbers from all three companies. Credit card numbers were taken only from NongHyup and Lotte.
All 27 top executives from the KB Financial Group have offered to resign over the incident. It remains to be seen if their resignations will be accepted by the company’s chairman.
The resignation of Sohn Kyoung-ik, the head of NongHyup's card business, has already been accepted.
Nine Lotte executives, including the company’s CEO, have also offered to resign. The board of directors will decide whether or not to approve the resignations.
Officials say it’s unlikely that the compromised information will be misused, particularly because it hasn’t been distributed.