Department stores and pharmaceutical companies breached... Personal data leaking in droves in Japan

[Financial News] New cases of personal information leaks have been confirmed in Japan, where hacking incidents are constant, affecting department store customers, internet service users and medical professionals.
According to the Tokyo Shimbun and other outlets on the 20th, H2O Retailing, the parent company of Hankyu Hanshin Department Stores, announced that “unauthorized access to the department store’s customer management system occurred the previous day, resulting in the leak of 1.26 million personal data records.”
That same day, email service provider Ymir Link announced that “there is a possibility that 9 million records of personal information, including email addresses, were leaked due to unauthorized access from outside.” Electronics retailer Joshin and Second Retailing, a video rental and secondhand goods sales company, also announced that they had been affected by hacking.
Internet service provider Nifty also said that unauthorized access that day led to the external leak of up to 540,000 records of personal information, including customers’ names, addresses and phone numbers. Pharmaceutical wholesaler Toho Holdings announced that its database for services provided to medical institutions had been hacked, leaking personal information including the names of healthcare workers.
Hacking incidents have recently been occurring frequently in Japan.
Last July, the government’s internal network, the “Government Solution Service,” was breached without authorization, exposing the personal information of around 246,000 government employees. Osaka Metropolitan University also experienced a major IT system outage that paralyzed its academic management system.
In addition, hacking led to the leak of 6.6 million records of personal information belonging to users of Times Car, Japan’s largest car-sharing company. IDC Frontier, a SoftBank subsidiary, also suffered a ransomware attack on its corporate cloud service system, affecting at least 495 companies and local governments.
Amid these incidents, some have forecast that hacking attacks will become even more frequent.
IT security company Trend Micro warned that “personal information stolen by cybercriminals will be exploited to break into corporate systems” and that “more attacks could occur.”
The company’s CEO, Eva Chen, expressed concern, saying, “AI has made it easier to organize leaked information and generate scam messages,” and that “personal information could be sold to fraud groups or other cybercriminals and misused as a tool in new intrusions.”
[email protected] Hong Chae-wan Reporter