William Mallard of Reuters reports another breach due to successful phishing of employees:
Japan’s pension system has been hacked and more than a million cases of personal data leaked, authorities said on Monday, in an embarrassment that revived memories of a scandal that helped topple Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his first term in office.
Japan Pension Service staff computers were improperly accessed by external email virus, leading to some 1.25 million cases of personal data being leaked, the system’s president, Toichiro Mizushima, told a hastily called news conference.
He apologised for the leak, which he said involved combinations of people’s names, identification numbers, birth dates and addresses.
Read more on Yahoo! News (AU).
Eleanor Warnock of WSJ reports that the breach was discovered on May 28, according to a statement from the pension service.
JPS representatives said they would change the pension numbers of the individuals affected and create a committee of outside experts to investigate the incident and strengthen cyber security.