Photo : YONHAP News
South Korean mobile communications giant SK Telecom has filed an administrative lawsuit objecting to the record fines the Personal Information Protection Commission imposed in August over a massive data breach that affected the carrier’s entire user base of 23 million.
According to sources within the legal community, SK Telecom filed the suit with the Seoul Administrative Court on Monday, a day before the deadline to challenge the fine of 135 billion won, or roughly 91-point-five million U.S. dollars.
SK Telecom disclosed in April last year that a leak from its servers compromised customers’ universal subscriber identity module, or USIM, data, prompting an investigation by the regulator while the company offered free USIM replacements to all of its users.
In August, the Personal Information Protection Commission said 25 types of data on subscribers to the mobile carrier’s LTE and 5G networks, including phone numbers and international mobile subscriber identity numbers, were leaked due to a cyberattack, adding that the company failed to take basic security measures and mismanaged its internal servers.
In court, SK Telecom will likely argue that the leak caused no financial damage and highlight the measures it has taken since, including pouring one-point-two trillion won into beefing up security and data protection.