GS Retail Fined $9.3 Million Over Data Leak Affecting 1.66 Million Customers

GS Retail, a retail giant that operates GS25 convenience stores, has been issued a 12.8 billion-won ($9.3 million) fine over a personal data leak that affected 1.66 million customers, the privacy watchdog said on Monday. According to the Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC), an unidentified hacker infiltrated the company's home shopping platform GS SHOP and its convenience store chain between 2024 and 2025 by repeatedly injecting a large number of pre-secured user IDs and passwords to successfully bypass login systems.

Through the member information modification pages, the hacker compromised the personal data of 1.58 million GS SHOP users and 79,128 GS25 customers. The leaked information included their names, gender, dates of birth, contact numbers, home addresses and email addresses, reports Yonhap news agency. The privacy watchdog said GS Retail failed to notice abnormal signs, such as a sharp spike in login attempts and failures from identical IP addresses within a short time frame, which allowed the unauthorised access to persist undetected over a prolonged period. The company also lacked a dedicated office for privacy protection at the time of the incident.

The PIPC said it has ordered GS Retail to formulate concrete preventive measures, such as advanced security policies capable of identifying abnormal connections, and to appoint dedicated personnel for privacy protection. Meanwhile, the fair trade watchdog's probe into the South Korean arm of US-listed Coupang appears to have hit a setback after the e-commerce giant refused investigators' recent attempts to conduct on-site inspections, citing procedural issues, industry sources said. According to sources, the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) had planned to conduct on-site inspections of Coupang's South Korean unit from last week through this week over allegations that the company violated the Act on Fair Transactions in Large Retail Business.

The allegations center on suspicions that Coupang shifted the costs of discounts onto its suppliers. Sources said Coupang declined to cooperate with the investigation, claiming that the company had not been notified of the inspections as stipulated under the Framework Act on Administrative Investigations.

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