Yesterday, digital messaging and payment facility platform ‘LINE Pay’ – released a statement in which it said that around 133,000 clients’ payment data was erroneously published on GitHub between September and November this year. The incident affected more than 51,000 Japanese users and around 82,000 Taiwanese and Thai users.
Data detailing individuals in a LINE Pay promotional program that was organized between late December 2020 and April 2021 was accidentally uploaded to the collaborative coding crèche by an employee.
After the attack findings, the company has notified its customers and the fintech division of the company has issued an official apology letter and assured its users of future protection.
The data that has been leaked includes the time, date, amount of transactions, and user and franchise store identification numbers. However, telephone, addresses, credit card, and bank account numbers were not leaked, the names of the customers and other credentials could be accessed with little effort.
Additionally, many political figures and dignitaries stopped using this app since the July 2021 cyberattack. Also, Japanese government officials have stopped using this app when it was discovered that important information was being leaked to China. Prior to the discovery, Japan extensively used this communication app for many regional official communications.
GitHub--headquartered in California, USA, has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. The platform is commonly used for organizing open-source projects for software development (As of November 2021, GitHub reports having over 73 million developers). It provides the distributed version control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git and its own factors. Besides the aforementioned, it also offers access control and several collaboration features such as feature requests, bug tracking, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.