Confidential documents managed by the South Korean Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have been found accessible through ChatGPT, revealing sensitive information including corporate data and personal phone numbers.
According to a report by Yonhap News, lawmaker Lee So-hee of the People Power Party stated during a National Assembly Health and Welfare Committee audit on October 13 that her office discovered 2,672 clinical trial documents available for download, despite no public documents being shown on the FDA's official results page. She emphasized that this was not a hacking incident, as anyone could access ChatGPT without needing a login or password.
Among the downloaded documents, 839 contained confidential corporate information, and 2,208 included personal phone numbers of responsible individuals.
In response, FDA Commissioner Oh Yu-kyung acknowledged the data leak and apologized, stating that access to the documents was blocked early that morning and that a comprehensive review is underway.
Similar incidents have occurred in the United States. In 2017, at least 1.8 billion posts collected by the U.S. Department of Defense were stored on Amazon S3 without proper confidentiality, making them publicly accessible. Additionally, thousands of military emails were exposed due to a configuration error in Microsoft Azure's government cloud.
Experts have raised concerns that without basic web access controls and measures to block search bots, confidential data from national and public institutions can be easily leaked through generative AI services, even in the absence of direct hacking attacks.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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