Flights delayed after Japan Airlines reports cyberattack

Sales for both domestic and international flights departing on Thursday were been suspended

By AFP

Published: Thu 26 Dec 2024, 10:08 AM

Japan Airlines reported a cyberattack on Thursday that caused delays to domestic and international flights but later said it had found and addressed the cause.

The airline, Japan's second biggest after All Nippon Airways (ANA), said 24 domestic flights had been delayed by more than half an hour.

Public broadcaster NHK said problems with the airline's baggage check-in system had caused delays at several Japanese airports but no major disruption was reported.

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"We identified and addressed the cause of the issue. We are checking the system recovery status," Japan Airlines (JAL) said in a post on social media platform X.

"Sales for both domestic and international flights departing today have been suspended. We apologise for any inconvenience caused," the post said.

A JAL spokeswoman told AFP earlier the company had been subjected to a cyberattack. Japanese media said it may have been a so-called DDoS attack aimed at overwhelming and disrupting a website or server.

Network disruption began at 7.24 am on Thursday (2224 GMT Wednesday), JAL said in a statement, adding that there was no impact on the safety of its operations.

Then "at 8.56am, we temporarily isolated the router (a device for exchanging data between networks) that was causing the disruption," it said.

JAL shares fell as much as 2.5 per cent in morning trade after the news emerged, before recovering slightly.

The airline is just the latest Japanese firm to be hit by a cyberattack.

Japan's space agency JAXA was targeted in 2023, although no sensitive information about rockets or satellites was accessed. The same year one of Japan's busiest ports was hit by a ransomware attack blamed on the Russia-based Lockbit group.

In 2022, a cyberattack at a Toyota supplier forced the top-selling automaker to halt operations at domestic plants.

More recently, the popular Japanese video-sharing website Niconico came under a large cyberattack in June.

Separately, a transport ministry committee tasked with probing a fatal January 2024 collision involving a JAL passenger jet released an interim report on Wednesday 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.

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