Consumer Inconvenience Increases...
"Not a Hacking Incident"
On December 17, the PC homepage and app of Aladdin, a major bookstore chain in South Korea, became inaccessible for a period in the afternoon, causing inconvenience to users.
On this day, Aladdin announced in a notice that it was conducting an emergency inspection due to a server hardware issue. The company posted that the PC homepage would be undergoing maintenance from 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., and the app from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.
As a result, all services, including book purchases, e-book access, used bookstore transactions, and account inquiries, were unavailable. The services were restored after approximately four hours of downtime. The homepage service was restored at around 5:17 p.m. that day, and the app is also being normalized sequentially.
Aladdin explained, "The service disruption occurred due to a RAM hardware failure in the database server. Although the server is operated with redundancy, an issue in the configuration prevented automatic recovery from functioning properly, resulting in a temporary service outage." Regarding concerns raised about a possible hacking incident, Aladdin stated, "This was unrelated to any external intrusion. There was no hacking involved at all."
Previously, in 2023, Aladdin was embroiled in controversy due to a hacking incident. At that time, a high school student hacked into Aladdin's system, resulting in the leak of 720,000 e-books, 5,000 of which were distributed via Telegram.
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