Seven & I Holdings, the Japan-based retail company which launched a QR-code mobile payment system at its Japanese 7-Eleven stores in July, revealed that it had been attacked by hackers. As per the experts, more security breaches may occur in Japan as the country is getting ready for the Tokyo Olympics.
The Japanese-American international chain 7-Eleven Inc. thought that using two-factor authentication for its just-released mobile payment feature would be too much of a hassle for users.
So, days after when they rolled out 7pay on July 1, hackers took advantage of the lack of two-step factor authentication and made off with over $350,000 from unsuspecting accounts.
But as per the security experts, the campaign just started and it could be huge as the country is preparing for the upcoming Summer Olympics when the number of more complex cyberattacks will grow drastically.
It should be noted that in 2018 Japan's National centre of Incident readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC), detected 212.1 billion instances of suspicious activity. It stated that almost half of these incidents were attributed to artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) devices that give the hackers the leverage to more access points.
As reported by the The Sunday Times, cyber-security expert and the director of technology at Darktrace, a cyber-defence firm, Dave Palmer who was attending a security and risk management summit in Tokyo quoted an adage, which says "If you're connected to the Internet, you're 100 milliseconds away from every criminal on the planet."
Multinational conglomerate company Toshiba released its 2019 Cyber Security Report a few days ago and there it mentioned that the company has noticed an average of 2.5 million attempted cyberattacks every day across its group of companies.
It should be mentioned that when the Rio Olympics happened in Brazil, among all the scandals the cybersecurity issues also made headlines just the way Pokemon Go and Euro 2016 became the topic of discussion as businesses and consumers faced security nightmares.
Since Tokyo is going to host one of the biggest sports events in 2020, reports claimed that a government-linked research institute, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has built a fake network to track down the hackers' behaviour and their methods. It is called Stardust network which is capable of letting the hackers believe that they have penetrated their intended target.
Even though Palmer praised Japan's effort against the hacking activities, he is more concerned about the vulnerabilities related to retail companies, old businesses and services that overlooked safety issues for speed.
