SoftBank, Daiwa Hit as Japan Logs 86 September Cyberattacks

Japan logged 86 cyber incidents in September 2026, up about 18% from August and 37% from July, Bloomberg reported. The names in the pile are not small: SoftBank Corp., Daiwa Securities, and the Lawson convenience-store chain.

Data from Trend Micro showed thirteen Japanese organizations reporting breaches on a single day during the month, the most this year.

Digital Transformation Minister Toshiharu Furukawa convened a meeting of ministries and agencies on Thursday, with the National Cybersecurity Office preparing to issue warnings to businesses. "The attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated," Furukawa told reporters, adding that "Everyone must become vigilant about protecting your own information yourself." The minister's baseline measures came out plain: unique passwords for each service, and multifactor authentication.

Cybersecurity specialists in the reporting say AI is helping attackers automate tasks "from scanning for software vulnerabilities to crafting phishing campaigns, making cybercrime faster, cheaper and harder to detect." Authorities are still investigating whether and how AI was used in many of the recent breaches. The piece notes that a suspected 26-year-old China-based attacker behind South Korean bank incidents "would probably not have been able to carry out the campaign without AI assistance," a reasoning being carried across to the Japan picture rather than proven inside it.

The wider Japanese consumer backdrop is heavy. Car-sharing service Times Car leaked information from some 6.6 million member accounts, and secondhand retailer BookOff Corp. has reported customer-data leaks of its own. Cybersecurity has been a running thread in our tracker, with 205 stories inside the last 90 days.