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Agence France-Presse

Japan Airlines said its systems were up and running again after a cyberattack on Thursday caused delays to domestic and international flights.
“We have identified the cause and scope of the malfunction, and the system has been restored,” said the airline, Japan’s second biggest after All Nippon Airways (ANA).
The “large data attack” did not leak any customer information and safety was unaffected, Japan Airlines (JAL) said in a post on social media platform X.
Japanese media said it may have been a so-called DDoS attack aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server.
Ticket sales for domestic and international flights departing on Thursday were suspended during the incident but have now resumed, JAL said.
Although the cyberattack did not cause major disruption, the airline earlier said that 24 domestic flights had been delayed by more than half an hour.
Problems with the carrier’s baggage check-in system caused delays at several Japanese airports, local media said.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi, the top government spokesman, said at a press conference, “Through the transport ministry, we have requested JAL to repair its system as soon as possible to respond appropriately to affected customers.”
Airlines, including ANA, Skymark Airlines, Solaseed Air and Star Flyer, have not experienced any cyberattacks and are operating as usual.
While Christmas Day is not a public holiday in Japan, the glitch nevertheless comes as many people are taking time off at the end of the year and as the peak winter travel season ramps up.
“I was able to check-in fine. I’ve been looking forward to this year-end trip, but it’s worrying that there’s trouble,” said a man in his 30s who was flying from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Ishigaki Island in the southern prefecture of Okinawa.


JAL is just the latest Japanese firm to be hit by a cyberattack.
Japan’s Space agency JAXA said in 2023 that it was likely penetrated by a cyberattack 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 Cybersecurity (NISC) – the agency responsible for defences against cyberattacks – was itself reportedly infiltrated by hackers in 2023 for as long as nine months.
In 2022, the government said a cyberattack was behind disruption at a Toyota supplier that forced the top-selling carmaker 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 cyberattack, its operator said.
Additional reporting by Kyodo


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Problems with the carrier’s baggage check-in system caused delays at several Japanese airports


Problems with the carrier’s baggage check-in system caused delays at several Japanese airports.


Japan Airlines

Aviation

Cybersecurity