Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank has announced that up to 137,000 pieces of customer information may have been leaked from an internal system. An unauthorized third party who had infiltrated from the outside was able to access this sensitive customer information between April 17th and 21st. The company has stated that it has not confirmed any fraudulent use of the compromised data at this present time. This unauthorized access to the company’s internal systems in Japan can be considered to be of an exceptionally large and serious scale.
The specific information that may have been viewed or leaked from the outside includes the policyholder’s name, their contact information, and their insurance policy number. The compromised data also includes records that may be duplicated, which could inflate the total number of unique individuals actually affected by this breach. About 7.27 million of the cases were personal information such as names and various different contact details of the company’s customers.
There are also approximately 8.44 million data records that cannot be used to identify individuals without matching them against the main Sompo Japan database.
The company Sompo Japan first announced on April 25th that its customer information may have been leaked due to this unauthorized access. In addition to directly contacting all of the customers who may have had their information leaked individually in this security breach. The company has also set up a dedicated contact point to respond to any customer inquiries and also to help manage this situation. This is a standard procedure for companies in Japan when they are dealing with major data security incidents that affect their customers. The company is working to be transparent and to provide support to all of those who have been affected by this data leak.
According to the well-known Tokyo Shoko Research agency, there were 189 different personal information leaks and lost data accidents announced.
These were announced by various listed companies and their subsidiaries in Japan during the year of 2024, an increase of nearly 40%. The most common cause was “virus infection and illegal access,” which accounted for sixty percent of the total reported cases. The largest data leak case in the country is said to be the 2014 Benesse Corporation breach, which involved about 35 million records. In recent years, other major Japanese companies like Internet Initiative Japan and an NTT West Japan subsidiary have also suffered major data breaches.
Reference:
