Japanese juggernaut Kawasaki Heavy Industries is the latest company to fall victim to a security breach. The company, which employs more than 35,000 people and has offices all over the globe recently disclosed the breach to its customers.
The company discovered that one or more unauthorized parties accessed a company server in Japan from an office in Thailand on June 11th of this year (2020).
Kawasaki’s IT security staff halted all communications between the two sites the same day the discovery was made. A subsequent investigation revealed that other unauthorized access from other overseas sites had occurred between June 11 through July 8th, which prompted the company to halt communications between those sites as well.
Communications were restored on November 30th once the investigation had been concluded and the company implemented new security protocols. They then conducted a security audit of more than 30,000 terminals on the corporate network.
A spokesman for the company stressed that although no evidence was found that any data was exfiltrated from corporate servers, it is possible that some information was stolen. However, if it was, then the attack was conducted with highly advanced technology that left no trace.
Kawasaki is hardly the only Japanese firm to have been beached this year. Other victims in 2020 include Kobe Steel, Pasco, Mitsubishi Electric and NEC. Sadly, they certainly won’t be the last, given that the frequency of hacking attacks is likely to continue increasing for the foreseeable future.
In any case, there’s not much to be done except to be aware that if you have had business dealings with Kawasaki or any of the other Japanese firms mentioned here, it’s at least possible that whatever data you’ve shared with those companies could have been compromised.
