South Korean Credit Leak: 40% of Country Has Credit Data Stolen

South Korea is in for a real headache as they attempt to clean up the mess from a credit leak that has compromised at least 20 million consumers’ information, affecting 40% of its 50 million inhabitants.

The South Korean credit leak, impressively enough, was orchestrated by one individual. An IT worker for the Korea Credit Bureau, which calculates the country’s credit scores, managed to copy credit card data from three credit card firms while working as a temporary consultant.

The affected credit cards are KB Kookmin Card, Lotte Card, and NH Nonghyup Card.

Several phone marketing companies actually bought the information off of the hacker, and the managers of these companies have since been arrested.

This news shouldn’t be entirely shocking to many of the country’s consumers, seeing as this is one of several major South Korean credit leaks in recent history. Just last month, a Citibank Korea employee was charged stealing data from 34,000 Citibank customers. 8.7 million customers of KT Copy, one of the country’s largest wireless carriers, had their data stolen in 2012. Hackers have stolen the personal information from 13 million customers of the gaming company Nexon back in 2011.

While this may seem fairly shocking, it should be noted that all of these combined still don’t add up to half of the amount of consumers affected by Target’s recent credit leak.

Regulators are currently looking into the security measures used by the Korea Credit Bureau, and any losses incurred by consumers due to fraud will be covered by the card firms.