Two Major Portals in Japan Breached This Week

Yahoo! Japan and Goo, both major online portals, have reported breaches this week. The incidents happened on Tuesday and Wednesday, but there isn’t a clear link between the two, aside from the fact that the attackers were after account information.

On Thursday, Goo (owned by NTT) updated their initial report to note that a brute-force attack was detected from a specific IP address, which was attempting 30 “unauthorized login attempts” per second.

The initial report on Wednesday said that some 100,000 accounts were illegally accessed, but they’ve since lowered that number to a potential 70,000 with 30,000 users being askedtd to change their account password just to remain on the safe side.

The company speculated that email addresses, telephone numbers, names, addresses, and zip codes were exposed, but there was no conclusive evidence that payment information (credit card) was compromised. As part of their planned security changes, Goo will require stricter password enforcement, and they’re considering implementing a password reset for all customers.

Yahoo! Japan (owned by Softbank), announced on Tuesday that malware was discovered on one of their servers. The software was planted by an attacker, allegedly, due to a backend application that was vulnerable to Remote File Inclusion. However, SecurityWeek was unable to confirm this detail outside of the source that provided the information.

While the path used to get the malware on to the server remains unknown, the fact that it managed to collect 1.27 million account records was confirmed by Japan’s search giant. Fortunately, while the malware collected the records, Yahoo! Japan said that it was discovered before it had a chance offload the harvested details to the attacker’s servers.

While Yahoo! Japan is working to prevent similar incidents from happening again, Goo is still investigating their attack, and are looking to confirm the exact scope of the problem. In the meantime, Goo users whose accounts were confirmed to have been illegitimately accessed are being forced to reset their passwords and are being notified as they login to the portal.