Line app owner flags data breach that may involve 440,000 items of personal information

More than 440,000 items of personal data, including some linked to the Line messaging app, may have been leaked in a security breach, Japanese tech giant LY Corporation, which operates the social platform, said on Monday.

As of Monday, there have “been no reports of any secondary damage caused, including the misuse of information of users and business partners”, the company said in a statement on its website, adding that it has “taken necessary actions such as blocking external access”.

The data suspected to have been breached contains more than 300,000 records of user information, including service use history connected to internal identifiers of Line users. But the company said that the information does not include bank account or credit card records or chat messages.

The company did not specify where the suspected data breach occurred but it issued a notice in Japanese, English, Malay, Thai and traditional Chinese, which is used in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Line cannot be used in mainland China.

The leak also affects LY’s clients and employees, it said. The compromised information includes 86,000 items of business partner data, such as email addresses, and more than 51,000 employee records, such as names, employee ID numbers and email addresses, according to the statement.

The incident occurred in early October when malware infected a computer owned by an LY subcontractor, giving rise to unauthorised access by a third party, according to the statement.

LY was formed last month through the merger of Z Holdings Corp, an internet holding company under SoftBank Group, news portal Yahoo Japan Corp and Line Corp.

Line has faced privacy problems in the past and in 2021 it blocked access to user data at its Chinese affiliate after media reports said that it let Chinese engineers at a Shanghai affiliate access Japanese user data without consent.

In the same year, police in Taiwan launched an investigation into the platform after more than 100 Line accounts used by officials were allegedly hacked.