Korea Electric Power Corp. Exposes Personal Info of All Employees; "Customer Data Safe"

[Anchor]

An incident has occurred where the personal information of all employees at Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), numbering over 20,000, was exposed to the outside. KEPCO has determined that general customer information remains safe and that the incident has low relevance to recent AI-driven hacking in the financial sector.

Reporter Kwon Ran has the details.

[Reporter]

KEPCO confirmed around 4:00 PM on October 1 that the personal information of its employees had been exposed on an external webpage.

Information including the names, departments, phone numbers, and email addresses of approximately 24,000 total employees was made public.

However, it was determined that unique identifiers such as resident registration numbers or sensitive information were not included.

KEPCO immediately blocked access to internal systems related to employee personal information and requested the operator of the external webpage to delete the exposed data.

However, it took approximately 32 hours from the time of detection for the information to be removed.

The exact cause of the exposure has not yet been confirmed.

Because the information was exposed on an external webpage rather than KEPCO's own homepage, the company is investigating various possibilities alongside relevant authorities, including whether it was a mistake by an outsourced data management provider or an external cyberattack.

Regarding the possibility of hacking utilizing AI tools, which has recently occurred consecutively in the financial sector, KEPCO maintained a cautious stance, stating, "No signs of hacking have been identified so far," and deliberately using the term "exposure" rather than "leak."

KEPCO emphasized that general customers' personal information is managed in a separate, dedicated system and was therefore not exposed in this incident.

(Video by Lee Seung-jin)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.