Japan Firms Increasingly Targeted by Cyberattacks

Tokyo, Oct. 7 (Jiji Press)--Japan has seen a spate of cyberattacks targeting companies that resulted in breaches of personal information.

While affected companies are scrambling to pay compensation and prevent recurrences, corporate Japan faces mounting challenges as the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence may be contributing to the spike in cyberattacks.

GMO Research & AI Inc., a subsidiary of GMO Internet Group Inc., has announced that unauthorized access hit its questionnaire website "infoQ" and that the names, telephone numbers and other information of 948,498 registered members were compromised.

Reward points worth a total of 2.86 million yen held by some of the members were fraudulently exchanged for gift codes for the Amazon.com online shopping website. The GMO side plans to fully compensate the affected members.

Discount store operator Mr Max Holdings Ltd. also fell victim to an attack, resulting in the breach of telephone numbers, email addresses and other data of up to 1,735,154 members registered with its apps and online stores.

[Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]