South Korea vowed Monday to prevent recurrence of the country's worst-ever client data leakage from credit card issuers as personal information of almost all adults in the country was estimated to be leaked from financial companies.

Lawmakers from the ruling Saenuri Party held an emergency meeting with the head of the financial regulator and other related-ministry officials to discuss how to tackle the worst-ever client data leakage and prevent the recurrence of the similar incidents.  

"The Saenuri Party strongly asked [regulatory officials] to take tough penalties [for the card companies concerned] and take fundamental measures to minimize the so-called do-not-ask type of personal information collection [by financial firms]," Kim Hak-yong, vice chairman of the ruling party's policy committee, told reporters.

According to the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), around 104 million units of personal information were leaked from three domestic credit card issuers, KB Kookmin, Lotte and NH Nonghyup. Prosecutors forwarded the case to the financial watchdog on January 8, saying that an unidentified, outsourced staff member in charge of data processing-related jobs stole the data and sold it to advertisement agents illegally.

Confidential data from around 20 million people, equivalent to almost all the adults in the country, was estimated to have been stolen in the process of leakage in the credit card companies as the card issuers were sharing client data with their settlement banks.

The KB Kookmin Card was affiliated with the country's largest bank Kookmin Bank, and the NH Nonghyup Card was linked to the Nonghyup Bank. The Lotte Card was associated with major banks, including Shinhan, Hana and Woori.

The leaked data included at most 19 personal information, including names, mobile phone numbers, ID numbers, home and work addresses, bank account numbers and credit details.

Xinhua