Japan Airlines Co said it restored its systems after a Thursday cyberattack that caused far-reaching delays to both its domestic and international flights, while confirming that the cause and extent of the malfunction had been pinpointed. The carrier is the second largest in Japan, behind ANA.
Japan Airlines took to X to assure customers the “large data attack” didn’t affect customer data, and flights were not at risk. Reports are that it could have been a DDoS – which tries to overwhelm a website or server with the aim of disrupting it.
The ticket sale for the flights scheduled to depart on Thursday was suspended at the time of the incident but restarted afterward. Major disruption to flights did not take place but the cyber-attack resulted in delaying 24 domestic flights by over half an hour each. Various Japanese airports faced delays because of issues regarding the baggage check-in mechanism.
JAL shares fell as much as 2.5 percent in morning trade, but regained some of their losses to end 0.2 percent down. In a related development, a transport ministry committee published an interim report on Friday on a fatal collision last January 2024, involving a JAL passenger jet that killed five people. Tokyo’s Haneda Airport blamed the collision on human error in the report.
A coast guard plane carrying six crew members was on a mission to bring supplies to a quake-hit area. The pilot of the small aircraft misjudged instructions from air traffic control thinking that the signal to enter into the runway was given. The captain was 40 minutes behind his schedule, and it made him hasten and hence the incident.
Tragically, the traffic controller did not notice the intruding aircraft and even ignored alarms designed to warn against such encroachments. Fortunately, all 379 passengers aboard the JAL Airbus evacuated just before the aircraft was engulfed in flames.
Japan Airlines is not alone in facing cyber threats; the nation has recently seen several high-profile attacks. Even in 2023, even Japan’s space agency JAXA was targeted, though no sensitive data on rockets or satellites was compromised.
The country also saw one of its busiest ports fall victim to a ransomware attack blamed on the Russia-based Lockbit group. A cyberattack on a supplier to Toyota forced temporary stops in production. More recently, a major cyberattack was launched against Niconico, the popular Japanese video-sharing platform, in June.
