20,000 Employees Hacked in an Hour... Samsung Electronics Sues Employee for Unauthorized Collection of Personal Data

More Than 20,000 Data Accesses in One Hour
Evidence Suggests List Was Sent to an Internal Third Party
Possible Link to "Blacklist of Non-Union Employees"

Samsung Electronics has filed a complaint with investigative authorities against employee A, accusing them of abusing the company's internal security system to illegally collect a large volume of personal data belonging to employees and disclosing it to a third party. This marks another incident related to personal information, following the recent "distribution of the list of non-union members" incident, prompting the company to pursue further legal action.

According to industry sources on April 16, employee A of Samsung Electronics is suspected of having accessed employee information more than 20,000 times within about one hour through two internal systems. The collected data included employee names, affiliated departments, and intranet IDs.

This abnormal access was reportedly detected by Samsung Electronics' real-time information security monitoring system. A security industry representative noted, "Accessing data more than 20,000 times in less than an hour is a serious violation of normal work activities," adding, "It is highly likely that a macro, an automated repetitive program, was used to deliberately obtain large-scale data."

The investigation found that employee A transferred the collected personal information in the form of files to an internal third party. The company is considering the possibility that the information was systematically used for specific purposes or private gain.

Industry sources believe this case is closely linked to the recent "distribution of the list of non-union members" incident. At that time, Samsung Electronics confirmed that a list containing department names, employee names, employee numbers, and union membership status was shared in a group messenger room of a specific department, and formally requested an investigation.

View of Samsung Electronics headquarters in Seocho-gu, Seoul. Photo by Yonhap News Agency

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