Hackers may have breached Japan's defence data after Mitsubishi Electric cyberattack

Whether it is Sony, Yahoo or United Nations, cybercriminals have been targeting major organizations since the growth of the hacking industry. This time they chose their new victim from Jpan's Tokyo, the Mitsubishi Electric Corp. As per the Japanese defence ministry, sensitive data on defence equipment may have been breached as a result of the cyberattack on the multinational company.

It should be noted that as per Mitsubishi, they detected the security breach in June 2019 but more than half a year later the company had disclosed their findings to the public.

Mitsubishi cyberattack

The defence ministry has revealed on Monday, February 10 that the major supplier of the country's defence and infrastructure systems, Mitsubishi have faced a cybersecurity breach. In a statement, the ministry also revealed that the company told them that potentially extracted data included requirements for defence equipment that the ministry specified for contract bidders in October 2018. However, as per the ministry, the security impact of such sensitive data breach is still under investigation.

On January 20, when reports revealed the 200-megabyte cyberattacks by cybercriminals, the Tokyo based company initially denied the possibility of a breach of the sensitive defence and infrastructure data. But later after running several checks, the company said that the defence ministry's information that required special care was included in a potential data breach.

Data breach

As per the previous report, Mitsubishi said that a group of Chinese hackers allegedly targeting the company and the information regarding the government agencies and other business partners might have been compromised. The company observed some irregular activity from a device located in Japan during this attack and the investigation led to detecting some unauthorized access to the top management in the company's head office. In a statement, the company said, "We deeply apologize for causing great worry and inconvenience."

It should be mentioned that such cyberattacks are now making the organizations more worried than ever as the cybercriminals are targeting companies that are contracted in important national projects. As per the security experts now these days identification of such attacks and hackers have become quite difficult as the nature of cyberattacks has been constantly evolving.

Countries under cyberthreat

In a recently published ransomware report by Emsisoft, security researchers showed a list of countries who have been facing ransomware attacks very frequently. Even though Japan's name is not one of these top targetted countries, the threat will be always there.

Ransom demand costs