SNU MBA Applied Business Project
An MBA graduation project that combines market reactions and online stakeholder data to evaluate cybersecurity crisis response alternatives.
Decision problem
I evaluated which response package could reduce further damage to customer trust and long-term enterprise value after a major Korean e-commerce platform disclosed a personal data breach.
The question was not whether the incident was inherently immoral. It was how the response activated perceptions of fairness, responsibility, and betrayal, and which strategy could address them.
Crisis chronology
I structured the initial disclosure, subsequent information, customer protection, government findings, and legal proceedings in one chronology. The unit of analysis was a sequence of disclosures and external reinterpretations, not a single announcement.
Market reaction
A market-model event study compared abnormal and cumulative abnormal returns around major disclosures. I separated narrow event-window shocks from later recovery paths and did not treat an announcement as proof of a long-term causal effect.
Signs remained consistent across four benchmark specifications. These narrow-window results show market repricing around disclosures, not a standalone long-term causal effect.
Chart summary and data
Negative reactions dominate the coded distribution. The labels are model outputs and describe this collected sample, not the public as a whole.
| Label | Count | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Negative | 6,009 | 72.70% |
| Neutral | 1,044 | 12.63% |
| Mixed | 717 | 8.68% |
| Positive | 495 | 5.99% |
72.7% negative
The share was only the first signal. The reaction centered more on fairness, responsibility, and governance criticism than on generic dissatisfaction.
Stakeholder reactions
I coded 8,265 analyzable online reactions for sentiment, Moral Foundations, and topic intensity. Because platform samples and expression styles differed, the analysis compared overall averages with high-intensity reactions by platform.
Chart summary and data
Naver News comments and Clien comments show high fairness and governance criticism. Clien comments have a higher exit-intention share than Naver News comments. The post samples are much smaller than the comment samples, especially the nine-item Theqoo post sample, so their higher percentages are not a platform ranking.
| Platform | n | Fairness | Privacy harm | Governance | Exit | Continued use |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naver News comments | 2,943 | 46.76% | 12.54% | 41.25% | 20.29% | 13.59% |
| Clien comments | 3,446 | 43.73% | 10.30% | 35.72% | 28.76% | 6.96% |
| Theqoo comments | 1,516 | 35.09% | 41.75% | 21.77% | 20.58% | 2.77% |
| Clien posts | 351 | 77.21% | 51.85% | 70.09% | 49.57% | 5.41% |
| Theqoo posts | 9 | 88.89% | 100.00% | 77.78% | 33.33% | 11.11% |
Comparative cases
I compared disclosure speed, customer protection, external validation, and regulatory outcomes across domestic and global cybersecurity crises. The cases indicated that fast notice and compensation were not sufficient without credible validation and governance action.
Strategic alternatives
I compared three response packages: limited disclosure with minimal protection, rapid disclosure with customer protection and staged updates, and a package that adds independent validation and stronger governance.
Evaluation criteria covered fairness and accountability perceptions, regulatory risk, market uncertainty, consistency of later disclosures, cost, and execution feasibility.
Recommendation
I recommended rapid disclosure and customer protection as baseline conditions, reinforced by independent validation, board oversight, control redesign, and explicit standards for subsequent updates.
The recommendation does not promise to remove short-term backlash. It creates a basis for external stakeholders to trust future information and control improvements.
Relationship to Probato
Probato had already begun in 2024 as an independent research and product direction. This is a later MBA graduation project that applies related qualitative stakeholder-analysis capabilities to a separate decision problem. The projects demonstrate shared skills without a project lineage.
Limitations
The project did not include the planned interviews or focus groups, so it could not directly observe internal decisions or customer experience. Online reactions were concentrated on selected platforms and do not represent public opinion as a whole.
The event study describes market movement around disclosures but does not establish a standalone causal effect. LLM coding is also model output, not human ground truth.