Park Dae-joon has resigned as CEO of South Korean retail giant Coupang after a data breach exposed the personal information of more than half of the country's population.
President Park apologized for the violation in a statement, citing a “deep sense of responsibility for the spread of infection and the subsequent recovery process.”
Coupang has replaced Park with Harold Rogers, a top lawyer at Coupang's U.S.-based parent company, according to a machine translation of the company's statement.
Last month, the retail giant, which is often compared to Amazon for its dominance in South Korean e-commerce and logistics, revealed details of a data breach that affected nearly 34 million people. The breach is said to have begun in June, but went unnoticed until November, when Coupang initially announced that the data of more than 4,500 customers had been stolen. The company has since revised this figure significantly upward.
The Coupang hack is the latest in a series of security incidents that have affected major companies and the national government across the country this year, including a data center fire that led to a massive and irrecoverable loss of South Korean government data.