First, a bit of background. In Korea, every citizen has an ID card. It has become common practice for web services in Korea to require the ID number during membership registration (in the US, it would be like requiring members to enter a social security number). This is true when signing up for services on a website, even something as trivial as a web portal or free webmail, or when creating an account for an online game. They claim this is done for ‘certification’ of users.
NCSoft is no exception. If you are Korean, and you play one of their games, you need to enter your ID number when you create an account. Unfortunately for NCSoft, the names and ID numbers of several thousand Lineage players were stolen by ‘hackers’ (see this and this). The stolen ID numbers were then used to create Lineage accounts. Now, victims of the theft can join a class action lawsuit being brought against NCSoft by a web-based legal firm. It appears that the information was stolen from other websites and not from NCSoft, but they are being held accountable because they
did not properly check the identities of hackers who used others’ personal profiles to create game accounts, and failed to protect gamers’ personal information from being stolen
At any rate, NCSoft is now using mobile-phone numbers to verify members (since nearly everyone in Korea has a mobile phone) and the Korean government is launching an investigation into 100,000 Korean websites to see if they gave out personal info to third parties. They are also considering a law that would ban websites from requiring ID numbers.
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