SK Telecom has been hit with a number of orders and penalties in the wake of a data breach affecting more than 20 million of its customers. In May, the Personal Information Protection Commission ordered the carrier to send individual notifications to customers whose personal information was breached. Now the government has determined that SK Telecom cannot charge cancellation fees to customers who canceled their accounts as a result of the breach and they must strengthen their security. The Economic Times reports:
South Korean authorities ordered on Friday SK Telecom to strengthen data security and imposed a fine after the country’s biggest mobile carrier was hit by a cyberattack that caused the leak of 26.96 million pieces of user data.
The measures come after SK Telecom in April disclosed that it had suffered a major leak of customer data caused by a malware attack. Shares in SK Telecom closed down 5.6% on Friday.
“SK Telecom failed to fulfil its duty of care to protect USIM data and did not comply with relevant regulations,” the Ministry of Science and ICT said in a statement.
“Therefore, the company is deemed negligent in this incident,” the ministry said as it announced the results of the government’s probe into the data leak.
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