Police Complete Second Search and Seizure at Coupang Over Personal Data Breach

Concluded Around 9 p.m.

The police have completed the second search and seizure operation in connection with the large-scale data breach at Coupang.

Police officers are carrying boxes out of the Coupang headquarters in Songpa-gu, Seoul, where a search and seizure operation took place on the 9th. Photo by Yonhap News

The Cyber Investigation Unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency announced at around 9 p.m. on December 10 that it had halted the search and seizure at Coupang's headquarters. The police began the operation at 11:15 a.m. that day at Coupang's headquarters office in Songpa-gu, Seoul. This was a continuation of the previous day's operation, which had not been completed, in order to secure Coupang's records.

The police had also conducted a search and seizure at Coupang for about 10 hours the previous day. Given the vast amount of records held by Coupang, both inside and outside the police, it is expected that securing digital records and other materials will take considerable time.

The search and seizure warrant named a former Coupang employee of Chinese nationality as a suspect on charges of violating the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, including unauthorized access to the information network and leaking confidential information. The police are tracking the leaker by securing the IP address used in the personal data breach, while also examining the technical vulnerabilities of Coupang's internal customer information management system. In addition, based on the materials obtained through the search and seizure, the police plan to comprehensively determine the route and cause of the personal data leak.

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