(Tokyo) The airline Japan Airlines announced Thursday that its computer systems were restored after a cyberattack which caused flight delays and forced it to temporarily interrupt ticket sales, the latest computer attack to date targeting Japan.
Updated at 6:20 a.m.
Mathias CENA
Agence France-Presse
“We have identified the cause and extent of the malfunction, and the system has been restored,” JAL wrote on social network X.
“The problem was due to a significant data attack and did not result in leaks of customer information or virus infections,” added the second Japanese airline.
A spokesperson confirmed to AFP on Thursday morning a “cyber attack”. According to Japanese media, this could be a so-called “DDoS” attack aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server.
Ticket sales for domestic and international flights departing Thursday, which had been suspended for a while, have resumed, Japan Airlines announced.
The cyberattack did not cause large-scale disruptions, but the company earlier reported that 24 domestic flights experienced delays of more than 30 minutes.
Public broadcaster NHK reported problems with the company's baggage check-in system disrupting flights at several airports across the country.
Serial cyberattacks
The value of JAL shares lost up to 2.5% in the morning on the Tokyo Stock Exchange before recovering: at the close it was down only 0.24% in a market trending upwards.
This is the latest cyberattack against Japanese companies and agencies.
The Japanese space agency (JAXA) announced that it had suffered “unauthorized access” at the end of 2023, admitting that the security of part of its data had been “compromised”.
In July of the same year, the port of Nagoya (center), the most important in the archipelago in terms of traffic, was paralyzed by a ransomware attack, which was attributed to the Russian-speaking hacking group LockBit.
And the Japanese agency responsible for cybersecurity (NISC) had itself suffered infiltration by hackers for a period of up to nine months, according to media reports.
In February 2022, the world's leading automobile manufacturer, Toyota, was also forced to suspend all of its production in the country for a day due to a cyberattack affecting one of its suppliers.
More recently, the very popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico had to temporarily suspend its services last June due to a large-scale cyberattack, its operator said.
Human error
A committee of the Japanese Ministry of Transport responsible for investigating a fatal collision earlier this year involving a JAL plane published a report on Wednesday attributing the accident which left five people dead to human error.
The accident, which occurred on January 2, 2024 at Tokyo-Haneda airport between a Japan Airlines Airbus 350 and a smaller Japanese coast guard aircraft, did not cause any casualties among the 379 passengers and members of crew of the JAL plane, all of whom were able to escape before it was completely destroyed by flames.
But five of the six occupants of the coast guard plane, which was to transport equipment to a central region of Japan ravaged the day before by an earthquake, were killed.
According to the report, the pilot of the Coast Guard plane misinterpreted an air traffic control officer's instructions as permission to enter the runway.
The captain was “in a hurry” at the time because the coast guard plane's departure was 40 minutes behind schedule, the report added.
According to this document, the air traffic controller did not notice that the plane had entered the runway, despite an alarm system warning of its presence.
