TOKYO, Oct 26 — Japanese companies are moving to pay compensation to users following waves of cyberattacks that have disrupted Internet services and raised concerns about economic stability.
GMO Internet Group's chief executive officer Masatoshi Kumagai, whose organisation is a leading provider of online financial services and includes Internet infrastructure and cryptocurrency trading, said customers will be compensated for losses stemming from unauthorised access following a cyberattack on its foreign exchange trading service, and all customers would receive ¥5,000 (RM129.93) as a gesture of goodwill.
"The internet itself is now starting to break down," he said in a blog post yesterday.
This evening, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said the government plans to compile an emergency package of cybersecurity measures against cyberattacks by sometime next week.
On Friday (October 23), Tokyo said it will set up a team to simulate cyberattacks using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify weaknesses in technology systems as organisations scrambled to curtail risks from flaws in the PHP programming language that underpins much of the Internet.
More broadly, Japanese companies are being roiled by attacks, with experts saying AI is helping automate tasks from scanning for software vulnerabilities to crafting phishing campaigns, making cybercrime faster, cheaper, and harder to detect.
"The Internet is increasingly being transformed into a tool that malicious actors use to threaten and rob people," Kumagai said.
Shares of GMO, which had a market value of US$2.6 billion (RM10.63 billion) as of Friday's close, slumped almost 16 per cent to a four-month low, while Tokyo's benchmark index rose 0.2 per cent.
Government and company websites in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere went offline last week after the disclosure of critical vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language prompted millions of hacking attempts.
Call on Japan to step up cyberdefence
Kumagai has urged the Japanese government to apply cyberdefence measures in response to the cyberattack, after the introduction of a cyberdefence system this month.
The system could involve steps such as attacking hostile servers to neutralise threats.
"Now is the time for the public and private sectors to work together to protect Japan," he said.
GMO said it received a demand for money from a party believed to be behind the attack, along with a threat to disclose company and customer information if it did not comply.
The group will not comply with the demand and will respond to the incident in coordination with the police and other authorities. It did not mention any connection to PHP flaws.
The company, which will provide a free alternative service to its customers for six months, said it could not currently calculate the impact on earnings from the goodwill payments and compensation for losses.
Kumagai noted that white-hat hackers working for the company had identified security issues, but the response was not deep or fast enough.
Customer data protection weaknesses
The scale of recent cyberattacks has exposed weaknesses in Japanese companies' ability to protect their wealth of customer data and raised the prospect of surging costs to beef up defences.
"Companies already have standard security measures in place, so if they want to strengthen them further, there is a possibility that the additional cost burden could be quite substantial," said IwaiCosmo Securities analyst Shoichi Arisawa.
TrendAI data has revealed that there have been 723 cybersecurity incidents in Japan starting this year until Tuesday (October 20), exceeding the annual totals in 2025 and 2024.
"Reports may reflect both the threats organisations face and greater visibility into incidents that would previously have gone undetected, been underinvestigated, or remained undisclosed," said cybersecurity firm ESET Japan's president Satoshi Nagano.
On Friday, Park24, which operates the Times car-sharing service, said that it would make ¥3,000 (RM77.96) payments to customers following a personal data breach last month.
The company said it would no longer retain identity document images after completing registration verification and expects to book an extraordinary loss of ¥5.5 billion yen (RM142.9 million) from responding to the attack and paying compensation.
