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The story
In the early hours of October 7, a third party gained unauthorized access to “IDCF Cloud,” a service operated by IDC Frontier Inc., causing an outage in the East Japan Region 1. The company has officially said only that it is investigating, but on the thread, users shared information claiming that numerous sites relying on the service — including the Ibaraki Prefectural Government, Tobu Zoo, and Shimizu S-Pulse — had gone down, fueling speculation that this was actually a ransomware attack. Comments mocking the slow pace of recovery mixed with warnings about the risks of depending on cloud infrastructure, and the discussion proceeded with official statements and unverified hearsay tangled together.
IDC Frontier Inc. announced that an outage has occurred in part of its cloud infrastructure service “IDCF Cloud” due to unauthorized access by a third party.
The outage began around 3:40 AM on October 7, affecting the East Japan Region 1. The company is investigating in order to resolve the outage and is also checking the safety of other regions, and says it will promptly disclose any new findings.
Source: internet.watch.impress.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Isn't this seriously bad?
This isn't even on the level of 'just emails and addresses leaked'
However you slice it, this is seriously nasty.
Massive ransomware attack hits IDC Frontier's East Japan region
Last updated:
40 minutes ago
Around 3:40 AM on October 7, a third party carried out a ransomware attack on IDCF Cloud, run by SoftBank subsidiary IDC Frontier, cutting the East Japan Region 1 off from the network. The attackers claim to have encrypted all 225 data stores and more than 16,600 VM disks, and to have destroyed 41.5PB of backups. Public and private services including the Ibaraki Prefectural Government, the prefectural police headquarters, and Tobu Zoo have been affected, with no clear recovery timeline in sight. The incident has exposed exactly the single-cloud-dependency risk that the Digital Agency's own guidelines warn about.
Hacker: 'Lol, hacked IDCF in 7 minutes.'
Hacker: 'Left notes in 225 spots lol.'
~1 hour later~
IDCF: 'Let's run a password change. That should sort it out.'
Hacker: 'Uh, we're already in, what are you even doing…'
Hacker: 'Guess nobody's read our letter yet, huh.'
~7 hours later~
IDCF: 'Let's reboot the power through the server management console…'
Hacker: '7 hours in and they're still flipping power switches that were never gonna fix anything.'
Hacker: 'I can see every useless thing you're doing, you know.'
Hacker: 'Still haven't read the letter…'
IDCF: 'Waaaah, it's still not coming back up!!!'
Hacker: 'What is with these guys…'
Hacker: 'Still haven't noticed, huh.'
Hacker: 'Fine, guess I'll just slap the message on the user login screen too…'
~After the message went up~
User: 'I logged into IDCF and it says we got hacked!!!!'
IDCF: 'Huh? There's a letter? Where?'
[List of sites down due to using IDCF Cloud]
(Survey by poster 'Yuna-sensei' as of 2:45 PM, October 7)
Ibaraki Prefectural Government
Ibaraki Prefectural Police Headquarters
Tobu Zoo
Northern Horse Park
St. Marianna University School of Medicine
Shibaura Machinery (formerly Toshiba Machine)
Shimizu S-Pulse
Kyoto Sanga F.C.
Naxos Music Library
Kodaira City, Tokyo
Japan Basketball Association
Poppins Nanny Service
Do-Regi
Illustration commission site SKIMA
Voice-recognition/transcription service UD Talk
Jorudan Transit Guide (business/PC software edition)
Hoover Brain
Adobe Creative College (campus location only)
Satsuriku no Tenshi x Strawberry (Broccoli)
Digital data is a real risk — anything you absolutely can't afford to lose, print it on paper!
Nah, save it to a floppy disk.
If every single Japanese citizen's bank account suddenly showed a balance of 10 billion yen, the yen would basically become worthless.
That's not really doable though. You can't conjure money out of nothing.
By the way, that screenshot going around that's supposedly the attacker's statement —
https://imgur.com/Q9VnK0x
— who actually leaked that, and where's it from?
The hacker finished the job in 7 minutes and sat back watching IDCF scramble, but after 7 hours they still hadn't read the 500-plus text notes left behind, so the hacker gave up and just posted it straight onto the admin console's login screen instead.
Better have the 'survival-threatening situation' emergency measures ready before the year's out.
This could be the start of a crisis threatening the nation's very survival, and yet Japan's news media apparently thinks beer getting 10 yen cheaper is the bigger story. This country really is finished.
Everything you look at on your phone is an open book to them — they'll get a full read on your kinks too.
If you don't want it taken, keep anything important off it and manage it separately.
Back when I was at Kobe University of Mercantile Marine, we had similar incidents all the time where you couldn't get from campus out to the outside network. It always started with an email claiming to be a press inquiry from the media. The media and the FBI are both constantly running illegal investigations.
Apparently they threw up their hands and said recovery's a lost cause. The client companies are on their own, fending for themselves.
The end. (meaning unclear — reads like troll copypasta)
Why are you bringing up old news? You're basically the poster child for Japanese people.
Background and Key Points of This Story
IDC Frontier’s official statement has stuck to the phrase “outage due to unauthorized access” and has not confirmed details such as whether it was ransomware or how much data was encrypted. The specific figures that spread through the thread — “225 data stores,” “over 16,600 VM disks,” “41.5PB of backups lost” — along with the list of affected sites like the Ibaraki Prefectural Government and Tobu Zoo, are unverified information that users gathered and reposted on their own, with no confirmation from the company itself. Because cloud infrastructure services are built so that multiple companies and local governments share the same underlying platform, this incident once again exposed how an attack on a single point can ripple out across a wide range of services. The thread was full of both mockery over the slow recovery and skepticism toward cloud dependence itself, but it’s worth noting that official information and unverified hearsay spread together, intermixed, throughout the discussion.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Business News+) thread ‘[IT] Outage Caused by Unauthorized Access Hits “IDCF Cloud” East Japan Region 1.’
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