Naver stated on the 17th that "the seller information of smart store sellers is legally required to be disclosed and there were no traces of hacking" in relation to reports that information was being traded in file form on the dark web.
On the same day, some media outlets reported that the information of 730,000 Naver smart store sellers had been traded on the dark web since 4th January. Naver's position is that this information is legally required to be disclosed.
Naver noted, "According to current law, there is a legal obligation to provide the business information of smart store sellers to consumers," adding, "As a telecommunications sales intermediary, all similar online commerce operators are also disclosing information."
It continued, "The files uploaded to the dark web appear to be business information that has been disclosed on web pages according to regulations and seems to have been collected by a third party," mentioning, "The results of our internal inspections showed that there are no traces of hacking, such as signs of a breach of the users' personal information databases."
Naver is currently implementing measures to block access, such as introducing an automatic input prevention (CAPTCHA) feature when verifying seller information and inserting random strings into URLs containing seller information to prevent access by third parties.
A Naver representative said, "We plan to continue expanding measures such as strengthening crawling detection and enhancing information access control in the future," adding, "So far, there have been no reports of damage due to the distribution of that information." It continued, "We are strengthening monitoring to prevent damage from the distribution of publicly available seller information in cooperation with the Personal Information Protection Commission and the Korea Internet & Security Agency."