Mitsubishi’s FX subsidiary Kabu.com reports DDoS attack
The company has formed a special group of experts to implement counter-measures and prevent future attacks.
Japanese Forex broker Kabu.com Securities, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc (TYO:8306), has fallen victim to a DDoS attack. The cyber attack happened early this morning, according to a report by the company confirming the incident.
The cyber attack targeted the website of the company, which was unavailable for about 36 minutes today. At 9:00, abnormal traffic was detected through the DDoS protection service and the company immediately launched an investigation. At 9:02 it became difficult to access Kabu.com’s website.
At 9:28, the company confirmed that the cause for the abnormal traffic is a cyber attack. At 9:38, the team managed to block the malicious cyber attack and the access to Kabu.com’s website was restored.
The company has established a team of experts to implement counter-measures and prevent future attacks from happening. The broker notes that the transaction system has been operating normally without any interference and that no information leakage was detected.
About two weeks ago, another online trading firm – Questrade, reported that it was the victim of a DDoS attack. The trading platforms of the company were subject to the attack. The company explained that what happened was not a ‘hack’ and no personal information had been compromised.
Cyber security is a serious issue for online trading companies and online payment services providers. It took more than two months for GMO Payment Gateway Inc (TYO:3769) to handle the consequences of a data breach of two of its client websites. The work of both websites – one run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and one run by the Japan Housing Finance Agency was stopped on March 10, 2017, several hours after GMO Payment Gateway confirmed unauthorized access to the websites and a heavy data leak. The credit card payment site for metropolitan tax operated by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government reopened on April 24, 2017. The credit card payment website of the Japan Housing Finance Agency was relaunched on June 5, 2017.
