IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of Japan's SoftBank, has been hit by a cyberattack, causing damage to companies and local governments that use the company's services.

NHK reported that IDC Frontier announced yesterday that its corporate cloud service system was targeted in a ransomware attack, affecting 495 companies and local governments.

IDC Frontier is a company that provides IT infrastructure such as cloud services and data centers.

A ransomware attack is a type of hacking where data is encrypted and a ransom is demanded in exchange for decryption.

Due to this attack, the official websites of Ibaraki Prefecture and its police headquarters went down, while Nissui's logistics subsidiary experienced disruptions that halted inbound and outbound shipments at all 17 of its logistics hubs nationwide.

Used car sales platform Auto Server also experienced difficulties with website access.

NHK explained that recovery is unlikely within today, and that IDC Frontier has shut down its systems to prevent secondary damage while investigating whether additional harm, such as data leaks, has occurred.

Recently, a series of hacking incidents targeting businesses, government administrative networks, and public universities has occurred in Japan.

Personal information belonging to 6.6 million users of Japan's largest car-sharing company, Times Car, was leaked due to "unauthorized external access," and up to 220,000 customer records from Daiwa Securities were compromised after a contractor's server was hacked.

In July, the government's internal network, the "Government Solution Service," suffered an unauthorized intrusion, compromising the personal information of approximately 246,000 public officials, while a large-scale system failure at Osaka Metropolitan University paralyzed its academic management system.

According to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, the number of unauthorized access incidents publicly disclosed by Japanese companies and local governments reached 600 from the beginning of this year through the end of last month.

(Photo: Yonhap News)