Japanese giant Kawasaki Heavy Industries, which operates in the heavy equipment manufacturing, automotive, aerospace and defense industries, announced a breach and possible data breach as third parties gained unauthorized access to the company’s server from several of its overseas offices.
“As a result of a thorough investigation, the company discovered that some information from its overseas offices could have fallen into the hands of third parties. Although at the moment the company has not found any evidence of information leakage to the outside, ”reads the official statement.
It is reported that on June 11, 2020, unknown attackers gained access to a server in Japan from the company’s Thai office. Already after the discovery of this attack, other unauthorized connections to servers in Japan were identified, carried out from June 11 to July 8 from other countries, including Indonesia, the Philippines and the United States.
As a result, the company was forced to temporarily interrupt all communication between these locations. Communication was restored only on November 30, 2020, after the imposition of restrictive measures, an audit of approximately 30,000 machines in the company’s networks in Japan and Thailand, and the final confirmation that there were no unauthorized connections to Japanese servers after August 2020.
Kawasaki now closely monitors any network communications between corporate offices, and a team of cybersecurity experts are working to strengthen protection so that similar breaches do not occur again in the future.
“Following confirmation of unauthorized access, a dedicated Kawasaki team working with an independent third-party information security firm investigated and implemented countermeasures. The investigation has confirmed that there is a possibility of transferring information of unknown content to a third party. However, at present, we have not found any evidence of data leakage, including personal, to third parties, “- said representatives of the corporation.