Bae Kyung-hoon, South Korea’s minister of science and ICT, speaks at a plenary meeting of the National Assembly’s Science, ICT, Broadcasting, and Communications Committee on Feb. 11, 2026. (Yonhap)
South Korean Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon responded Wednesday to the e-commerce giant Coupang’s rebuttal of findings from a civilian-government joint investigation team investigation into a leak of personal information at the company.
The minister, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said that the findings had all been shared with and were not contested by Coupang Korea, but the head office in the US is “saying something different.”
Speaking at a plenary session of the National Assembly Science, ICT, Broadcasting, and Communications Committee that day, Bae responded to Coupang’s claim a day earlier that the joint investigation team announcement “omits” some of the facts.
Bae stressed that the information in question was “all shared and confirmed with Coupang Korea before the [joint investigation team] announcement and accepted.”
“Yet the Coupang head office [Coupang Inc.] in the US is saying something different,” he added.
“Coupang is responding in a way that protects its own interests and shareholders, and I also believe various lobbying efforts are taking place,” he also said.
In a statement published shortly after the joint investigation team announcement on Tuesday, Coupang said the team’s report “states that the former employee [responsible for leaking the information] made 50,000 queries against building lobby access codes but omits the analysis confirming that those queries accessed 2,609 accounts with building lobby access codes.”
Bae also signaled his plans to formally protest Coupang’s continued insistence on its own independent finding of personal information having been leaked from “3,000” accounts, even after the South Korean government’s official announcement that information for more than 30 million accounts was affected.
Responding to a comment from Democratic Party lawmaker Lee Hoon-ki about Coupang having “reduced the scale of the damages by an order of 10,000,” Bae said that the actions were “unacceptable” and that he planned to “lodge protests with Coupang Korea and the head office.”
“In terms of Coupang’s claims of 3,000 [accounts] suffering leaks, Coupang submitted a related report to the Ministry of Science and ICT, but we received only a portion rather than the full report,” the ICT minister said.
“The [data from] 33.67 million accounts could have been stored somewhere else, like a hard disk or the cloud, but Coupang has not been clear on that point,” he stressed.
Bae also responded to concerns about the potential for the situation to escalate into a trade conflict between South Korea and the US.
“We are responding in the necessary areas in terms of diplomacy and trade, and we are continuing to communicate the South Korean government’s position to the US government,” he said.
“Our policy is for the government to respond in a thorough way without causing diplomatic issues with the US,” he added.
By Sun Dam-eun, staff reporter
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