Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi convened an emergency ministerial meeting on Monday and ordered an emergency package of cybersecurity measures by next week, after a wave of corporate cyberattacks that hit GMO Internet and Park24.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi convened an emergency ministerial meeting on cybersecurity in Tokyo on Monday evening and ordered the government to compile an emergency package of measures by next week, as Japan responds to a wave of corporate cyberattacks. Chief Cabinet Secretary Minoru Kihara announced the meeting earlier on Monday, and Takaichi said Japan would also join global efforts to try to identify the attackers.
The most prominent case is GMO Internet Group, whose foreign-exchange trading service suffered unauthorised access, with some customers reporting transactions they did not recognise. GMO appealed to the government on Saturday for help neutralising the source of the attack. Its chief executive, Masatoshi Kumagai, disclosed on his blog that those believed to be behind the attack demanded $50 million in cryptocurrency and threatened to disclose company and customer information; GMO did not comply. The company will pay 5,000 yen to all customers as an apology and provide an alternative service free for six months, and its shares fell nearly 16 percent on Monday to their lowest in four months.
Park24, which operates the Times car-sharing service, said on Friday it would make 3,000-yen payments to customers after a personal data breach last month, will no longer retain identity document images after registration verification, and expects an extraordinary loss of 5.5 billion yen for its response and compensation. The scale goes beyond the two companies: there have been 723 cybersecurity incidents in Japan in the year to October 20, according to TrendAI, a unit of Trend Micro, exceeding the annual totals for 2025 and 2024.
The meeting, the package and the GMO payment are reported by Reuters and AFP syndications, and the $50 million demand comes from the GMO chief executive’s blog as reported by Reuters. One claim in the coverage needs a caution: the suggestion that a Chinese artificial intelligence cybersecurity tool called Artex was used in several recent hacks comes from an information-security arm of GMO as reported by AFP, and it is not independently confirmed attribution. The effect of GMO’s compensation on its earnings had not yet been calculated, according to Reuters.
The emergency package due next week is the dated checkpoint for this story. Its contents, and whether the attackers are identified, will show whether Japan’s response moves beyond customer compensation by individual companies into a coordinated government effort against a wave that is already running ahead of the last two years’ incident counts.