Japan’s GMO Internet Group offered a $1 million bounty to track down the hackers and disclosed their demands on the 26th. It began accepting information on the 27th. More than 20,000 people use its cloud service, and the hackers threatened to disclose customer information.
GMO Internet Group disclosed that it had suffered a cyberattack and that the hackers had demanded that the company send $50,000,000 in cryptocurrency. In response, the company established a bounty program seeking information that could help clarify the incident and began accepting submissions at noon on the 27th.
The cloud service provided for automated FX trading is said to have more than 20,000 users. Kumagai Masatoshi (熊谷正寿), the company’s Representative Director and President, explicitly stated that the company would not comply with the hackers’ demands. The hackers subsequently published the name, telephone number, occupation and other details of 1 person on their website as GMO customer information, and threatened to disclose information successively at noon each day if the company did not agree to negotiations.
However, the authenticity of the disclosed information has not been confirmed. A person whose name matched the disclosed information reportedly said that it was false and testified that they had never used GMO Cloud. GMO stated that if information on an actual user is disclosed, it plans to pay a special consolation payment of up to ¥3 million per disclosure, depending on the type of information.
Meanwhile, Sony’s internet connectivity service So-net also announced on the 27th that 2,585,481 personal data records had been leaked, while Dai-ichi Life disclosed that information on approximately 124,000 employees, former employees and others had been leaked.