Chapter 1: What happened in the Coupang data breach in South Korea?
In South Korea, a big e-commerce company agrees to compensate its customers for being hacked. Live from the UK, this is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. I'm Gideon Long. Good morning. The South Korean e-commerce firm Kupang has agreed to pay over a billion dollars in compensation to its users for a massive data breach. The BBC's Archana Shukla can tell us more.
Hi, Archana. Hi, Gideon. Just reminders of this story, because it was a huge breach, wasn't it? Yes, absolutely. It was personal data for almost two-thirds of the South Korean population. You know, Coupang is one of the largest e-commerce players in South Korea and is often called South Korea's Amazon. And nearly 33 million accounts were exposed.
Although later the company said that data for only 3,000 accounts were stolen. but it certainly did expose information for pretty much most of the adult population.
Chapter 2: What compensation is Coupang offering to its customers?
And one of the most astonishing things about it is that the breach of the service apparently began in June this year, but the company didn't notice anything until November. Have they said anything about why there was such a delay?
Well, they haven't mentioned why there was a delay in finding out the issues, but they did mention that earlier they had inspected about 4,500 accounts having some sort of, you know, a not normal situation. But the company's CEO has definitely come out and apologised that they should have addressed this crisis much earlier. And do we know who was behind this hack?
Authorities believe the breach was carried out by a former employee of Coupang who actually worked on some of the platform's authentication systems. But the company has confirmed that only 3,000 accounts' data, which is the names, email IDs, addresses, etc., were copied by the former employee on his personal computer.
although the company also says that he has not sold it to any other third party. And the financial data, which is the credit card information and account passwords, were reportedly not accessed. So once the investigation gets over, more details will come out. The Parliament is going to also hear the matter for the next two days starting tomorrow. Arjuna, thanks for joining us here on Marketplace.
Thank you so much. Let's do the numbers. The price of copper has risen sharply due to worries about tightening supply.
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Chapter 3: Why did it take so long for Coupang to discover the breach?
It's at well over $12,000 a tonne on the London Metal Exchange. And tech giant Apple has overtaken China's Vivo to become the biggest smartphone seller in India. Apple has sold over 6.5 million of its iPhone 16 series in the country this year. Coming back to hacking, it's been a big year for corporate hacks worldwide, not just in South Korea.
Cyber criminals have targeted organisations from the Japanese brewer Asahi to the British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover. Here's the BBC's cyber correspondent, Joe Tidy. Hi, Joe. Hi. So how does this year rank? It feels like it's been a bad year for cyber hacks. Is that right? Do the numbers back that up? I think so. And it's not just the numbers.
It's also the nature of them and how high profile they've been.
Chapter 4: Who was responsible for the Coupang data breach?
Quite often when you cover cyber security, cyber crime, it's all ones and zeros. It's all very removed from people's lives and it's hard to kind of grasp. But this year we've seen some very visible and tangible impacts on not just the companies affected, but society in general.
If you look at the wave of retail attacks in the UK, there was M&S, Marks & Spencer, which is a very much loved and long-established department store. There was Co-op, a supermarket, a household name in the UK, and Harrods. Everyone knows Harrods around the world. All three hit in quick succession.
And in some cases, with M&S and Co-op, we saw shelves being empty because they had logistics problems because everything was encrypted and down. Then, of course, you've got Jaguar Land Rover, as you mentioned there. It brought production lines to a halt, so no cars were being made for many weeks. affected the company in a huge way, but also affected the UK economy.
We saw for the first time this year, they mentioned the cyber attack as having an actual effect on the economic output of the country. And what do we know about the perpetrators of these various attacks and their motives? The interesting thing this year has been that although we've got the steady drumbeat of ransomware attacks from the largely Russian-speaking cybercrime community and ecosystem...
This year, we've also seen the resurgence of a teenage hacking culture, which has always been there, but it comes in cycles. And this year, we've seen a real uptick in activity from English-speaking kids banding together to carry out major cyber attacks. And that's where we think a lot of these attacks have come from.
The retail attacks, perhaps even JLR, and then a wave of attacks on airlines, including Qantas Airlines as well. So I think we've got those two things coming together this year that have made it particularly troubling and quite damaging. And this very bad year for corporate hacks, 2025, what does that mean, do you think, when you look ahead to 2026 for cybersecurity?
You'd like to think it's a bit of a wake-up call. And we have said this kind of thing before. It's a cliche, isn't it? But I think when you have the attacks and the kind of visible impacts that we've had, particularly in the UK, but around the world as well. You mentioned Asahi, the Japanese...
brewer i think a lot of companies will be out there thinking well hang on a minute i thought of cyber as a near the top of my risk register but i didn't actually expect it to be having this much impact on not only me and my business but my customers and community as well so i think people will be thinking to themselves how do i make that not happen to me and the interesting thing we've seen this year as well is the the rise of or adaptation of what we call social engineering techniques so
The cybersecurity companies will want you to think it's all about quantum and AI. But actually, quite often, it is people using con men-like tactics to trick their ways into companies and get credentials to log in. And that's what we saw, we think, with some of these teenage attacks. They literally called up IT help desks and pretended to be employees.
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Chapter 5: How does 2023 compare to previous years in terms of cyberattacks?
He introduced the country's first coinage. Earlier coins found in Scotland, such as those from the Roman or Viking eras, had been minted elsewhere. And it had been thought all King David's earliest coins were made in England. But the silver coin, found in a wooded area near Pennycook in 2023, bears an inscription showing it was minted in Edinburgh in the second half of the 1130s.
The metal detectorist who found the coin was paid its value as a reward. Rebecca Drought there on a very rare coin in Scotland. In the UK, I'm Gideon Long with the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service. Thanks very much for listening.