Japanese telecom giant NTT Communications (NTT COM) confirmed that hackers accessed data from around 18,000 corporate customers during the February cyberattack, affecting the number of unknown individuals.
Tokyo-based NTT COM, which provides telephone and networking technology to businesses, said it discovered a data breach on February 5 after determining that hackers had gained “unauthorized access” to the internal systems used to manage service orders.
Stolen data includes customer names, contract numbers, phone numbers, email addresses, physical addresses and information regarding the use of services belonging to 17,891 organizations.
NTT COM has not yet said that the number of individual employees in the affected organizations has personal information taken in violations or that it has not shared details about the companies whose data was stolen. NTT COM has over 100,000 corporate customers in 70 countries around the world, according to its website.
NTT COM did not immediately respond to TechCrunch questions outside of work hours.
After detecting the violation, NTT COM said “access was immediately restricted” to the compromised devices within the internal system. However, the company said on February 15 that it discovered that the attacker had compromised another device on its internal network, but the company said it was “quickly disconnected.”
It remains to be seen who was behind the February breaches, and the specific nature of the cyberattack remains unknown. NTT COM cyberattacks have not yet been billed by major ransomware groups.
In recent years, communications agencies have become a major focus for Cybercriminal and state-sponsored hackers.
In September 2024, it was revealed that a “salt timber” hacking group related to China had violated several US telephone and internet giants to access private communications from senior US government officials. According to a recent report, Salt Typhoon continues to target telecommunications providers.
Cybercriminals are also known to target banks of phone records stored by the Telco giants. This can be used for further cyberattacks.
Have you been notified of an NTT COM data breach? We look forward to hearing from you. From non-work devices, you can safely contact the Carly page at a signal of +44 1536 853968 or email it at carly.page@techcrunch.com. You can also contact TechCrunch via SecureDrop.