Line app company has informed users of unauthorized access to its systems, resulting in the leak of hundreds of thousands of user, business partner and employee records.
In a notice sent to affected customers on Nov. 27, the company said unauthorized individuals gained access to its servers through an affiliate’s NAVER Cloud Corporation system.
The attack occurred on Oct. 9, when malware infected a PC belonging to an employee of the affiliated company.
On October 17, the security team at LY Corporation, which operates the Line app, determined that it was “highly likely” that it was unauthorized access by unauthorized individuals to the app’s systems.
Unauthorized individuals accessed hundreds of thousands of records containing user, employee, and business partner data.
The exposed Line app user data included information such as call page activity, call completion types, call room data (including country, gender, age group, and operating system of senders and recipients), and content posting data including times and dates, total number of subscribers/friends, and video start and end times.
Employees’ personal information, including first names, last names, ID numbers and email addresses, as well as 86,071 records of email addresses of the company’s business partners were also leaked.
The company says the leak did not include information about bank accounts, credit cards or chats on the LINE app.
“We have not received reports of any secondary damage, including misuse of user and business partner information, but we will continue to investigate and take prompt action if necessary,” the company said in a statement, which urged anyone affected by the leak to remain cautious.
Line was launched in Japan in June 2011. The popular Japanese app provides video and text chat services, free VoIP conversations and video conferencing.
LINE is widely used not only in Japan but also in Taiwan, Thailand and Indonesia, with more than 176 million monthly active users worldwide.
Recently this month, WhatsApp, an app owned by Meta, allegedly leaked data about its users. On Nov. 16, a certain “threat agent” posted an ad on a prominent hacker community forum to sell the 2022 database containing about 500 million mobile numbers of WhatsApp users. A sampling of the data, researched by Cybernews agency, confirms that this is most likely true.
