Hackers target Panasonic; data breach suspected

Panasonic Corporation has said its network was targeted by a third party on November 11 resulting in the breach of some data on the file server.  

"As the result of an internal investigation, it was determined that some data on a file server had been accessed during the intrusion," the company said in a statement. 

Panasonic has yet to confirm if any customer data was compromised and said it is working with third-party cybersecurity specialists to ascertain the extent of damage. 

"We are working with cybersecurity specialists to investigate the leak and determine if the breach involved customers' personal information and/or sensitive information related to social infrastructure," the company said. 

However, according to a report by Japanese public broadcaster NHK, the targeted servers held information related to the company’s business partners and technologies. Another Japanese media company Mainichi reported that the breach could have occurred several months ago and was only detected in November after Panasonic saw an abnormal increase in network traffic.  

Panasonic assured that the breach was reported immediately after the detection and security measures were implemented to contain it.  

Cyberattacks targeting organisations have increased since the pandemic started and they had to quickly prepare for new realities such as remote work. According to cybersecurity firm Checkpoint, attacks on organisations rose by 29% YoY (year-on-year) globally in the first half of 2021.  

This isn't Panasonic’s only brush with attackers recently. According to a report, Panasonic India was also targeted in October 2020 by an extortion campaign where an unknown attacker threatened to release 4GB of data belonging to the company if they did not pay a ransom of $500,000. The attacker, in this case, was willing to sell the stolen data for payment of $40,000 in Bitcoins. On November 3, the hacker released the stolen data on the Internet.