Fujitsu Retires Tool Targeted by Threat Actors

Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has announced plans to retire the ProjectWEB project information sharing tool after it was targeted by threat actors earlier this year.

Designed to aid collaboration between teams, ProjectWEB is a tool that organizations can employ to share project data both within and outside of their environments.

In May 2021, ProjectWEB was the target of a cyberattack that resulted in threat actors compromising some information that Fujitsu’s customers were sharing within the application, including data from Japanese ministries.

The Japanese company stopped the service immediately and launched an investigation into the incident, which uncovered a series of vulnerabilities that adversaries could have used to gain access to the sharing tool.

“One of these was used to illegitimately obtain legitimate IDs and passwords to make unauthorized access to ProjectWEB in such a way that it appeared like an authorized user was accessing the tool through normal channels of authentication and communication,” the company says.

This week, Fujitsu announced that, after appointing a dedicated CISO on October 1, it decided to discontinue the vulnerable ProjectWEB and focus resources on developing a new tool to replace it.

“Fujitsu Limited will introduce a new project information sharing tool that addresses the issues raised by this incident with robust information security measures including those in line with zero-trust practices and will be migrating project management tasks to the new tool. As a result of the review, it was decided to discontinue the use of the existing information sharing tool,” the company announced.

For the time being, however, Fujitsu isn’t providing further information on the May security incident, as the results of its internal investigation are pending review by a committee of external experts.

The company is also consulting with the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) “to confirm the appropriateness of the investigation into the cause of this incident” and will share more on the matter once the reviews are completed.

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