🇯🇵 Japan’s outdated cyber defenses leave door open to hackers

Japan is facing a surge of cyberattacks that officials have described as a national “state of emergency,” reports Yomiuri.

The scope of the damage:

🔴 over 600 cyberattacks in first nine months of 2026 - surpassing the total for 2025 (per TrendAI)

🔴 public university forced to cancel classes for a week after its systems were compromised

🔴 a car-sharing service saw more than one million personal records, including driver’s license photos and home addresses, leaked

🔴 a SoftBank-linked cloud provider’s breach affected nearly 500 companies and government bodies, among them a major rail operator and a police headquarters

AI tools have accelerated the threat:

♦️ automated systems scan for vulnerabilities continuously across the globe

♦️ machine translation has removed a long-standing obstacle: Japan’s language once made phishing emails and calls easy to spot as foreign, but now those messages can sound convincingly local

Japan’s underdeveloped cybersecurity defenses make it a clear target: assessments rank it among the most frequently targeted in Asia, and in the lowest tier for overall cyber capabilities.

A new cyber defense law now gives police and the military greater powers to monitor and disable foreign servers threatening national security, and new guidance has been issued on data handling and two-factor authentication.

Yet specialists stress that sustained investment and better patching of outdated systems are required.

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