Nikkei says 1.83 million personal data items leaked after cloud account breach

Japanese media group Nikkei Inc. said on Friday 16 October that about 1.83 million items of personal information were leaked after someone gained unauthorised access to a cloud service it uses for system development.

In a statement, Nikkei said about 150,000 of the items contained one or more of a name, email address, postal address, phone number or date of birth. About 120,000 of those included an email address. The remaining 1.68 million items contained only information that cannot identify a person. The company said no credit card information was involved.

Nikkei said the credentials used to access the service “were stolen by unknown means”. It said the access took place from the early hours to the morning of 7 October, and that it has disabled the credentials.

The company said it reported the incident to Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission on 11 October and is reviewing the scope of the breach. As of 16 October it had found no misuse of the leaked information, no system outages and no data tampering, the statement said.

Nikkei apologised and said it would contact each person whose information is confirmed to have been leaked. It said it would put “the necessary security improvements in place”.

Anadolu also reported the breach, citing Nikkei’s figures.