Yahoo Japan is 35.5 percent held by Japan’s mobile phone operator SoftBank,
and 34.7 percent held by US Internet giant Yahoo! Its popular portal Yahoo!
Japan holds the top search engine position in Japan with a more than 50 per
cent market share, compared with around 40 per cent for rival Google.
Ross Brewer, of security firm LogRhythm, said ““If 22 million user IDs have
been stolen, then this has to be considered a pretty wide scale hack.
Depressingly though, it’s no longer that unusual to hear of hacks on this
grand scale, and Yahoo is just the latest in an increasingly long line of
major brands which is learning that it’s no longer a matter of ‘if’ you’re
breached, but ‘when’. To its credit, Yahoo has been quick to come clean
about this attack.”
In 2011, Sony said information such as usernames, passwords and birth dates of
more than 100 million people may have been compromised after hackers struck
the PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment services.
Japan acknowledges that its preventative measures against cyberattacks remain
underdeveloped, with the national police agency having announced this month
it would launch a team to analyse and combat cyberattacks.
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said last month that information related to
the International Space Station may have been leaked during an unauthorised
attempt to access its system.