The airline had to interrupt the sale of its tickets as well as baggage check-in on certain flights after a “failure” in its computer system occurred this Thursday, December 26.
The airline Japan Airlines declared this Thursday, December 26 that it had been the victim of a cyberattack which caused flight delays, and interrupted its ticket sales for the rest of the day. “We can confirm that we have been victims of a cyber attack and that we are dealing with the situation”a spokesperson for the second largest Japanese airline told AFP.
JAL reported on the social network “failure” of its computer system since 7:24 a.m. Thursday Japanese time (10:24 p.m. GMT Wednesday) potentially “potentially affect domestic and international flight operations”. “The cause of the outage has been identified and addressed (…) We are currently verifying the recovery status of the system”she added later.
Ticket sales were halted for domestic and international flights departing Thursday, she said. Problems with the airline's baggage check-in system delayed more than a dozen flights at several Japanese airports, public broadcaster NHK said, but the cyberattack did not appear to have caused major disruptions. According to Kyodo news agency, at least 14 domestic flights suffered delays of up to an hour and international flights were also affected.
Serial cyberattacks
The value of JAL shares lost up to 2.5% in the morning on the Tokyo Stock Exchange before recovering slightly: around 02:00 GMT it fell by 1.3% in a market trending upwards. This is the latest cyberattack against Japanese companies and agencies.
The Japanese space agency (Jaxa) had thus announced that it had suffered at the end of 2023 “unauthorized access”admitting that the security of part of his data had been «compromise». 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 cybersecurity agency (NISC) itself had been infiltrated by hackers for a period of up to nine months, according to media reports.
In February 2022, the world's largest automobile manufacturer, Toyota, was 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.
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