Japan Airlines hit by cyber attack, causing delays to domestic, international flights
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The attack began at 7.24am (6.24am in Singapore) and affected the airline’s internal and external systems.
PHOTO: AFP
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TOKYO – Japan Airlines (JAL) on Dec 26 said it was hit by a cyber attack that caused delays to some of its domestic and international flights.
The airline, Japan’s second biggest after All Nippon Airways (ANA), said 24 domestic flights were delayed by more than half an hour.
JAL said its systems were back up hours later, with same-day ticket sales resuming.
Public broadcaster NHK said problems with the airline’s baggage check-in system caused delays at several Japanese airports, but no major disruption was reported.
JAL said it began having network problems from around 7.24am (6.24am in Singapore). But the cause of the failure had been identified by 8.56am, it added.
It temporarily shut down a router that was causing malfunctions and suspended ticket sales for flights departing on Dec 26.
No customer information was leaked, however, the company said, and it suffered no damage from computer viruses.
Japanese media said it may have been a so-called DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server.
ANA saw no signs of an attack on its systems, a spokesman said.
Earlier this week, American Airlines briefly grounded all flights for an hour, disrupting travel for thousands on Christmas Eve, due to a technical glitch involving its network hardware.
JAL is just the latest Japanese firm to be hit by a cyber attack.
Japan’s Space agency Jaxa said in 2023 that it was likely penetrated by a cyber attack by unknown entities, but no sensitive information about rockets or satellites was accessed.
The same year, Nagoya Port, one of Japan’s busiest, was crippled by a ransomware attack that was blamed on Lockbit, a Russia-based cybercrime organisation.
Japan’s National Centre of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cyber security – the agency responsible for defences against cyber attacks – was itself reportedly infiltrated by hackers in 2023 for as long as nine months.
In 2022, the government said a cyber attack was behind disruption at a Toyota supplier that forced the top-selling automaker to halt operations at domestic plants for a day.
More recently, the popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico suspended its services in June because it was under a large-scale cyber attack, its operator said.
Pilot error
Separately, a Transport Ministry committee tasked with probing a fatal January 2024 collision involving a JAL passenger jet released an interim report on Dec 25 blaming human error for the incident that killed five people.
The collision at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport was with a coast guard plane carrying six crew members – of whom five were killed – that was on mission to deliver relief supplies to a quake-hit central region of Japan.
According to the report, the smaller plane’s pilot mistook an air traffic control officer’s instructions to mean authorisation had been given to enter the runway.
The captain was also “in a hurry” at the time because the coast guard plane’s departure was 40 minutes behind schedule, the report said.
The traffic controller failed to notice the plane had intruded into the runway, oblivious even to an alarm system warning against its presence.
All 379 people on board the JAL Airbus escaped just before the aircraft was engulfed in flames. REUTERS, AFP
