Japanese carrier NTT Docomo said DDoS attack disrupted multiple services

NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile network operator, said it experienced a cyber attack that caused temporary disruptions to its customer-facing services.

 

In a data security incident notice, NTT Docomo said that at 5:27 am on January 2, several Docomo services faced disruptions, including the company’s search site “goo”. The company launched an investigation, with assistance from external cyber security experts, to determine the nature and scope of the incident.

 

The investigation revealed that Docomo had been a victim of a distributed denial-of-service attack, which flooded its network with junk traffic from multiple sources, leaving some services unavailable.

 

NTT Docomo added that the attack lasted for almost 12 hours and it was able to resume normal operations around 4.10 pm in the evening.

 

The telecom provider added that its “dPayment” payment service also faced disruptions but the outage wasn’t related to the DDoS attack.

 

“As part of the recovery measures, some content updates for the affected services have been affected, but the latest information will be posted on each service site as they occur,” the company said.

 

In December, Japan Airlines also suffered operational disruptions following a major denial-of-service attack that targeted its systems.

 

In a statement posted on its website, the flag carrier said that around 7:24 AM on Dec. 26, it suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack that involved cyber criminals flooding a website or online service with malicious traffic to make it inaccessible to legitimate users.

 

Soon after identifying the cyber security incident, the airline company said it took the affected systems offline, which in turn affected ticket sales for same-day departures and some other online services for passengers. The airline company assured passengers that no customer data was compromised and its systems weren’t injected with malicious code.