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By Kyu-seok Shim and Jack Kim<\/p>\n
SEOUL, April 23 (Reuters) – South Korea’s data protection agency said on Thursday it has fined a matchmaking service \u200cover the leak of its members’ sensitive personal information, including their weight, \u200cblood type and whether they were previously married.<\/p>\n
The Personal Information Protection Commission said in a statement the \u200bcompany, Duo, failed to implement adequate measures to safeguard their membership database and was slow to take action after its system was hacked last year.<\/p>\n
It ordered Duo to pay a 1.21 billion won ($815,400) fine, take corrective action to improve how it handles \u200cpersonal data and to fully \u2060disclose details of the incident.<\/p>\n
Hackers gained unauthorised access to the company database in January last year and downloaded private personal information \u2060of more than 420,000 current and former members. The data also included phone numbers, addresses, schools graduated from and workplaces, it said.<\/p>\n
The commission said Duo also violated regulations on \u200bthe collection \u200band storage of personal data, such as \u200bcitizenship ID numbers and passwords, \u200cand failed to meet a requirement to delete the information of nearly 300,000 members gathered more than five years ago.<\/p>\n
Duo is one of South Korea’s best-known matchmaking services, in a country where many have long relied on such services in some form or other to find partners.<\/p>\n
The company said in a statement it respected the \u200cagency’s findings and “deeply regrets that we failed to \u200badequately protect our members\u2019 personal data.”<\/p>\n
It said the \u200bbreach resulted from a “hacking attack \u200bthat was extremely difficult to detect or prevent.”<\/p>\n
Duo says on its \u200cwebsite its services have led to \u200bmore than 53,000 weddings \u200band seven couples tying the knot on average every day. It had 36,000 members as of this week, the website said.<\/p>\n
A number of South \u200bKorean companies and online platforms \u200chave suffered breaches of customer data as a result of hacking or \u200bstaff misconduct, prompting a government crackdown following a public outcry.<\/p>\n
($1 = 1,483.9000 \u200bwon)<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jack KimEditing by Ed Davies)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n