--- title: Japan's Ruling-Party Cyber Chief Likens a Wave of Corporate Data Breaches to a State of Emergency in Cyberspace description: Which Japanese companies were hacked, why the LDP cyber chief likened it to a cyberspace emergency, and what Tokyo has asked firms and banks to do. author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief) date: 2026-10-15T13:32:59.860Z updated: 2026-10-15T13:32:59.872Z canonical: https://www.sovereignmagazine.com/article/japan-cyber-emergency-data-breaches image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-professionals-collaborating-at-a-tech-centric-workspace-with-7988761.jpg categories: Science & Tech content_type: News region: Japan publication: Sovereign Magazine schema_type: Article --- Japanese companies including the travel booking site Skyticket, the Times Car sharing service and the JR East railway group have disclosed data breaches covering tens of millions of customer records since late September. At a meeting at Liberal Democratic Party headquarters on the morning of 9 October, Masaaki Taira, a former digital minister who heads the party's National Cybersecurity Strategy Headquarters, said the situation could be called a contingency, or a state of emergency, in cyberspace, and that the whole government needed to tackle it, TV Asahi reported. The government has not declared an emergency. Taira was speaking at a ruling-party meeting, not for the cabinet, though some posts online reported his words as a declaration. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told the lower house on 8 October that the leaks were causing public anxiety and that the government would quickly organise and analyse the information and issue advisories to a wide range of businesses. Toshiharu Furukawa, the digital and cyber security minister, called it a very urgent situation the same day. ## Seven Japanese Companies Have Disclosed More Than 55 Million Records That May Have Leaked Adventure Inc, which runs Skyticket, has the largest figure, about 14.64 million records, Jiji Press reported. The restaurant chain Yakiniku King disclosed on 5 October that 10,788,963 of its 10,808,784 app accounts had leaked. Daiichikosho, owner of the Big Echo karaoke chain, put its count at about 8.72 million, including about 90,000 employees, after malware infected the computer of an employee at a Nippon Columbia group contractor, according to Impress Watch. Park24, which runs Times Car, said about 6.6 million accounts leaked, including licence details, and that [images of identity documents such as driver's licences, utility bills and student cards leaked for about 1.6 million of them](https://www.park24.co.jp/news/2026/09/20260929-1.html). JR East said about 6.09 million customer accounts may have been compromised, Jiji reported, most of them email addresses held by its Eki-net ticketing service and its View Card credit card company. Bookoff gave a figure of up to 6.43 million records and Lawson 2,155,345 Lawson ID records. Together the seven disclosures come to more than 55 million records, though most are maximums that may have leaked, and they count records, not people. The Financial Times reported that more than 20 major Japanese companies have disclosed attacks in recent weeks. ## A Ransomware Attack on SoftBank's Cloud Unit Stopped Servers for 495 Customers IDC Frontier, SoftBank's cloud subsidiary, said [ransomware hit part of its east Japan cloud region](https://www.idcf.jp/news/topics/20261008001) from about 3.40am on 7 October, stopping virtual servers for 495 corporate and local-government customers, and that data in the affected zones will be hard to recover except from customers' own backups. The JR East leak came through that attack, as did one at JR Central covering about 15,000 online shoppers. The Asahi Shimbun reported that the outage halted shipments at 17 Nissui Logistics sites and took the Ibaraki prefectural government and police websites offline. ## Ministers Have Told Companies to Check Their Contractors and Delete Data They Do Not Need Officials from every ministry met under Furukawa on 8 October and agreed to gather incident reports at the National Cybersecurity Office, part of the Cabinet Secretariat, and to ask firms to delete data they do not need. The office's advisory the next day asks businesses holding large amounts of personal data to patch quickly, use multi-factor authentication, check the security of contractors that hold their data and give those contractors as little of it as possible. It tells management that damage from cyberattacks is no longer a problem for the IT department alone. The [Financial Services Agency's notice to banks and other financial firms](https://www.fsa.go.jp/news/r8/sonota/20261009/20261009.html) cites leaks of customer data that included images of identity documents such as driver's licences. It asks them to re-check online identity checks for anything unnatural in submitted ID and face images, and to move as quickly as possible rather than wait for 1 April 2027, when amended rules under the Act on Prevention of Transfer of Criminal Proceeds end the sending of ID-document photos and move, in principle, to reading the IC chip in the card. ## Most of the Companies Hit Fall Outside Japan's New Active Cyber Defence Law Parts of Japan's active cyber defence law took effect on 1 October, allowing the state, under set conditions, to get into and disable computers used in serious attacks on the country or its critical infrastructure. Operators in the law's 15 critical-infrastructure sectors must report incidents. Nikkei reported that most of the firms now being targeted are outside those sectors, and that the attackers are after customer data rather than shutting down infrastructure. Taira made the same point at the party meeting and told reporters afterwards that sensors were needed to spot intruders before personal data is taken out. No company or agency has said artificial intelligence was used in any of the breaches. Yoshinobu Kusunoki, head of the National Police Agency, said on 8 October that it was not yet clear what lay behind the cases or whether they were linked. Jun Osawa of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation told Nikkei that the government should have warned companies earlier. ## FAQ **Q: What should customers of the affected companies do?** Stop reusing passwords, turn on multi-factor authentication and watch for suspicious emails and social media messages. That was Furukawa's advice to the public on 7 October. **Q: Were credit card numbers leaked?** Mostly not. Park24 said no card data was taken from Times Car, Bookoff said no payment data was involved and TV Asahi reported that the JR East group leaks did not include card numbers, though Lawson said 26 app reservation records included part of a card number. **Q: How many cyberattacks has Japan had this year?** The National Police Agency logged a record 123 ransomware incidents in the first half of 2026, according to The Japan Times, and Reuters, citing TrendAI data, reported that Japan recorded more cybersecurity incidents in the first nine months of the year than in all of last year.