According to Techmeme, South Korean e-commerce giant Coupang says it will offer over $1 billion in compensation to all 33.7 million customers affected by what is being called the country’s biggest-ever data breach. The breach was caused by a former employee who accessed the sensitive customer data. In a separate but equally chaotic tech story, Ubisoft was forced to take *Rainbow Six Siege* offline after a major security incident. A group exploited a service to gift players roughly $339,960,000,000,000—that’s 339 *trillion* dollars worth—of in-game currency, while also wielding the power to ban players and modify inventories. Ubisoft has now brought the game back online but has announced it will perform a rollback to undo all the damages caused by the hack.
The Stakeholder Shakeout
So, what does this mean for the people actually involved? For Coupang’s 33.7 million users—which is basically most of South Korea’s adult population—it’s a massive violation of trust, even with a billion-dollar olive branch. That compensation is unprecedented, but it shows how catastrophic the breach is perceived to be. It’s a direct hit to their reputation and wallet. For *Rainbow Six Siege* players, it’s a weird mix of farce and frustration. One day you’re a quadrillionaire in R6 Credits, the next day everything’s rolled back and the servers are a mess. The real impact is on their confidence in Ubisoft’s security. If a group can manipulate bans and inventories so easily, what’s next?
A Question of Scale and Security
Here’s the thing that ties these two stories together, even though they’re worlds apart: scale. Coupang’s breach shows the insane liability of holding data for an entire nation. Ubisoft’s hack shows the fragility of live-service game economies, where a single exploited endpoint can create comically large numbers that break the whole system. Both are failures of internal access control—one by a former employee, the other by external actors finding a tool they shouldn’t have. It makes you wonder, how many other companies are one bad API or one disgruntled ex-staffer away from a billion-dollar mistake or a $339 trillion headache?
The Inevitable Rollback
Ubisoft’s decision to roll back the game was the only move they could make. You can’t just let that much fake currency exist in the ecosystem; it would destroy the in-game economy permanently. But man, are players going to be annoyed. Imagine the folks who spent their sudden “wealth” before the servers went down, or those who got unfairly banned by the hackers. Rebuilding that goodwill is a long haul. For Coupang, the “rollback” is that huge compensation payout—an attempt to reset customer sentiment. But in both cases, the genie is out of the bottle. The headlines are written, the tweets are posted (you can see the chaos on vxunderground’s X feed and Ubisoft’s own Rainbow Six Game X account), and the trust is fractured. These incidents are a brutal reminder that in our digital world, security isn’t just a feature—it’s the entire foundation.
