Within just two days of retail giant Seven & I Holdings’ launch of a QR-code mobile payment system at its Japanese 7-11 stores in July, it called a hasty news conference to disclose that it had been hacked.
The scheme, 7pay, was scrapped last month in view of how easily its defences had been breached.
Crooks siphoned off around 55 million yen (S$718,420) from about 900 users, taking advantage of the lack of two-step factor authentication to verify identities when users logged into the system.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as Japan gears up to host the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics and the number of attempted cyber attacks grows exponentially, with security experts warning of more complex breaches ahead.
“There is an industry adage that says: ‘If you’re connected to the Internet, you’re 100 milliseconds away from every criminal on the planet’,” cyber-security expert Dave Palmer told The Sunday Times in Tokyo, where he was speaking at a security and risk management summit.
Mr Palmer is the director of technology at Darktrace, a cyber-defence firm that taps artificial intelligence to detect unusual or atypical activity and works to block these unauthorised attempts from…
