GMO Internet said it would compensate customers of its foreign-exchange trading service after unauthorised access linked to a wave of cyberattacks in Japan, offering 5,000 yen as an initial payment and refusing an extortion demand that threatened to disclose company and customer information.
GMO Internet will compensate customers after a cyberattack on its foreign-exchange trading service, the Japanese company said on Sunday, becoming the most concrete corporate casualty yet of a wave of attacks that has disrupted internet services in Japan and beyond.
Chief executive Masatoshi Kumagai said in a blog post that all customers would receive 5,000 yen, about 32 dollars, as an initial gesture of good faith for losses stemming from unauthorised access. The company said it had received a demand for money from a party believed to be behind the attack, along with a threat to disclose company and customer information if it did not pay, and that it would not comply, responding instead in coordination with police and other authorities.
The attack sits inside a wider incident: Japan said on Friday it would set up a team to simulate cyberattacks using artificial intelligence to find weaknesses in technology systems, after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language prompted millions of hacking attempts and took government and company websites offline in Japan, Europe and elsewhere last week. GMO, with a market value of about 2.6 billion dollars as of Friday's close, saw its shares fall 11 percent in Tokyo on Monday morning against a flat benchmark.
The compensation, the extortion demand and the share move are all reported by Reuters from the company's blog post and market data, and the same wire account is carried by multiple outlets. The underlying claim about the scale of hacking attempts traces to the broader reporting on the PHP disclosure, and the precise losses suffered by individual GMO customers have not been itemised publicly, which is why the 5,000 yen payment is described by the company as an initial gesture rather than full restitution.
For Japanese companies, the episode shows how quickly a software flaw can become a balance-sheet problem: the attacks are being automated with artificial intelligence tools that scan for vulnerabilities and craft phishing campaigns, making intrusions faster, cheaper and harder to detect, according to security experts cited in the reporting.
GMO has asked the Japanese government to apply cyber-defence measures in response, and the next test will be whether compensation and police coordination restore confidence in a trading service whose customers discovered the breach through their provider rather than through a regulator.