Landmark Ruling Against ‘Lineage’ Maker Over Data Leak

A court in Seoul, South Korea has slapped NCSoft with a lawsuit that could run nearly half a million dollars – and has major implications for other class-action lawsuits against that and other gaming companies who are careless with players’ personal data.

8,500 Internet users in Korea had their personal information stolen on various portal sites. This information was used to set up fraudulent game accounts. A district court in Seoul ruled that NCSoft was negligent when, two years ago, it failed to protect user accounts during an upgrade of Lineage II when they neglected to encode the log files containing confidential user data. Because of this, ID’s and passwords of players who logged in between 11-16 May, 2004 became public. NCSoft was ordered to pay W500,000 ($500 USD) to each of the five plaintiffs in the current suit.

Plaintiff attorney Park Jin-Sik states the hope that “… the ruling will contribute to considerably improving the highly unfair agreements game makers force users to sign and their poor consumer protection mechanism.”

A court in Seoul, South Korea has slapped NCSoft with a lawsuit that could run nearly half a million dollars – and has major implications for other class-action lawsuits against that and other gaming companies who are careless with players’ personal data.

8,500 Internet users in Korea had their personal information stolen on various portal sites. This information was used to set up fraudulent game accounts. A district court in Seoul ruled that NCSoft was negligent when, two years ago, it failed to protect user accounts during an upgrade of Lineage II when they neglected to encode the log files containing confidential user data. Because of this, ID’s and passwords of players who logged in between 11-16 May, 2004 became public. NCSoft was ordered to pay W500,000 ($500 USD) to each of the five plaintiffs in the current suit.

Plaintiff attorney Park Jin-Sik states the hope that “… the ruling will contribute to considerably improving the highly unfair agreements game makers force users to sign and their poor consumer protection mechanism.”