Ministry of Land 'RentHome' Personal Information Leak Suspicion... Ministry of Land "Under Investigation" (Comprehensive)

[Asia Economy Reporter Moon Jiwon] It has been reported that a personal information leak incident occurred in 'RentHome,' an online rental registration system operated by the government. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT), the competent authority, stated that they are "conducting a thorough investigation" without confirming whether personal information was leaked.

According to MOLIT and multiple rental business operators on the 13th, from around 11:30 a.m. the previous day, a 'connection failure' occurred where access to RentHome was delayed or impossible.

From the afternoon, it was reported that when accessing RentHome, users were logged in under the names of other rental business operators instead of their own.

In one case, a rental business operator residing in Sejong logged in and was connected under the name of a rental business operator residing in Songpa-gu, Seoul, revealing that person's name, phone number, date of birth, and details of civil complaints and rental contract reports.

RentHome is an online portal where rental business operators can handle all civil affairs, including rental business registration applications, rental contract reporting, and voluntary reporting of mandatory violations. MOLIT is the competent authority, and currently, the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) is entrusted with its operation.

One rental business operator told Asia Economy, "When logging into RentHome, the report contents of completely unrelated people appeared," adding, "Personal information such as addresses, phone numbers, and the first digits of resident registration numbers of unknown landlords and tenants were visible."

On the morning of the same day, MOLIT released an explanatory statement regarding the RentHome error, saying, "Server downtime and some errors occurred due to a surge in access, but recovery has now been completed."

MOLIT explained, "As part of a joint inspection on mandatory violations of registered rentals, the voluntary reporting period for rental contracts is being operated until the end of June," and "SMS notifications about the voluntary reporting deadline were sent to all rental business operators nationwide starting from 11 a.m. the previous day."

They added, "Following this, rental business operators who received the voluntary reporting SMS simultaneously accessed RentHome, causing connection delays and failures from 11:30 a.m., and the system error and failure were fully restored by 4:21 p.m."

However, it was reported that some rental business operators still experienced being logged into RentHome under other people's names until the evening of the previous day. One rental business operator said, "While working on RentHome for a long time, I later noticed that I was logged into another person's account or simultaneously logged in under both my own and another person's names."

However, MOLIT has not yet confirmed the facts or the extent of damage related to the personal information leak suspicions.

MOLIT emphasized, "There are claims that during the system error recovery process, some rental business operators' rental registration information was exposed when logging in under other rental business operators' accounts, and we are conducting a thorough investigation into the matter," adding, "We will continue to improve the system to ensure RentHome operates without errors despite increased access."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.