The Financial Services Commission (FSC) has imposed a 1.5-month business suspension and a 5.0 billion won fine on Lotte Card, which suffered a data leak affecting 2.97 million customers due to a hacking incident last year.

This marks the first time a business suspension sanction has been applied to a financial company for a data leak caused by hacking.

However, the penalty was reduced compared to the Financial Supervisory Service's (FSS) initial sanction proposal, which had called for a 4.5-month business suspension.

The FSC announced during its 14th meeting today (the 31st) that it resolved to impose the unprecedented "business suspension" for the hacking incident and a 5.0 billion won fine for violations of the Credit Information Act regarding the Lotte Card data leak.

Enforcing a business suspension due to hacking damage is an unprecedented measure.

However, compared to the FSS's sanction proposal from late April, which decided on a 4.5-month business suspension and a 5.0 billion won fine, the suspension period was reduced by 3 months.

The FSC explained that the 1.5-month suspension period was determined after considering various aspects, including fairness with previous sanction cases, the company's post-incident remediation efforts, and the potential impact on the financial market and consumers.

The business suspension will be in effect from the 1st of next month until September 15.

During the business suspension period, the company will be restricted from recruiting new members, which is expected to impact its operations.

The FSC stated, "Financial authorities plan to seamlessly pursue institutional improvements to fundamentally strengthen the security management systems of financial companies to prevent similar data leak incidents from recurring in the future."

It added, "We will also do our utmost to protect financial consumers by continuously monitoring the impact of the business suspension to ensure no inconvenience arises in financial consumers' use of card services."

A Lotte Card official stated, "We humbly accept the decision of the financial authorities and sincerely apologize to our customers for causing concern due to this incident."

They further stated, "This business suspension is a measure affecting only partial new business operations and has no impact on existing members' use of services. We will make every effort to ensure all necessary measures, such as information security, are thoroughly implemented to prevent such cases from happening again and to be reborn as a trusted financial institution."

(Photo: Yonhap News)