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The story
On October 22, Japan’s Digital Agency announced that personal information—including names and email addresses—entered into the inquiry form on its website may have leaked to outside parties. The cause was a cyberattack on Studio Inc., the company behind “Studio,” the website-building tool the agency used to run part of its site. The agency says no secondary damage has been confirmed so far. On 5ch, posters repeatedly questioned the structure of outsourcing a government contact point to an obscure outside firm, as well as a staffing setup where most employees are on loan from the private sector, with some also voicing concern about consolidating personal data onto the My Number card.
Personal information entered into the Digital Agency website’s inquiry form may have leaked to outside parties
The Digital Agency announced on October 22 that personal information—including names and email addresses—entered into the inquiry form on its website may have leaked to outside parties. It says that, as of now, no secondary damage such as misuse of the leaked personal information has been confirmed. The cause was unauthorized access to the service of Studio, the company behind the website-building tool the agency used to run part of its site.
(details omitted)
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Always a step behind, and every move just makes the damage bigger
Only people who agreed to be leaked bother posting here, so it's kind of weird to treat the leak itself as the problem.
More like the Digital Vested-Interests Agency
Exactly this
After every layer skims its cut, maybe 1% of the budget actually goes to development
I said the Studio leak was bad news
This country doesn't have real IT engineers
It's not a licensed industry, so it's crawling with fronts for organized crime (反社, slang for crime-linked operators)
Lumpy codecs, crooked codecs
There isn't even source code from the developer. I guess that's "digital" too
Leave it to the Japan Hacker Association
https://www.hacker.or.jp
Re: #48
Yeah
The whole push to consolidate everything into My Number might itself be a criminal's game plan
Get everyone to bundle it all into one, then
the bomber releases it — boom
Sure it's possible
And if it happens, it'll be on a scale nothing like this one
Even faxes get saved as digital data these days
The only option left is handwritten letters
Set hiring standards that actually screen for real security knowledge, and fire any current staff who don't even meet the bare minimum
Most of the staff are on loan from private companies, still technically employed by their original firms — they're IT pros, not law-school bureaucrats
This is just the level Japanese IT is at
Probably because it's a vested-interest company tied to the "elite class" (上級国民, sarcastic slang for the privileged few)
This reads like the vendor itself was managing the personal data, as if citizens' data was being illegally stored on the vendor's own servers
>"Our company stores submitted content and the like under contract from the site operator."
studio.design/ja/security/notice/2026-10-incident
what exactly does the Digital Agency actually do?
Exactly this
They don't even have the authority to direct anything
That's why their response to the leak is such a mess
Obviously — their real job is securing budget and handing it out to their buddies
It'd be so much easier if we could all just agree to quit the internet altogether
lol that's a good one
Re: #184
You just stamp your hanko seal and you're done
Re: #180-183
Leave it to the Japan Hacker Association
What was the Minister for Cybersecurity even doing?
If even Google or Amazon got hit like this, we'd be finished
Seriously, thank god Google and Amazon aren't Japanese companies
If a hacker ever seized top-level access to the Digital Agency, that would become the starting point for the worst-case backdoor — letting them impersonate legitimate administrators and tunnel their way, domino-style, into administrative systems across all of Japan
And who's actually designing and managing that network — some sub-subcontractor three or four layers down the outsourcing chain from the Digital Agency?
Background and key points of this discussion
The leak the Digital Agency announced traces back to the fact that the inquiry form on its website ran not on a dedicated in-house system but on an external website-building tool called “Studio,” and Studio itself was the target of a cyberattack. Since this is a separate system from the My Number card’s core infrastructure, it would be premature to directly link it to the “My Number data leak” fears raised in the thread. As of the announcement, no secondary damage has been confirmed, and there’s no evidence yet that the personal information has actually been misused. Opinions in the thread split between those who took issue with how the vendor was chosen and the multi-layered subcontracting structure itself, and those who saw this kind of risk as simply unavoidable given the push toward digitalization; views were similarly divided over the fact that most of the agency’s staff are on loan from private companies.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Personal Information Entered on Digital Agency Inquiry Form May Have Leaked Externally After Cyberattack on Site-Building Tool Studio Inc.“
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