A temporary worker in NTT in Japan illegally stole user information, with 5.96 million messages involved.

CTOnews.com July 21, Japanese communications operator NTT DOCOMO announced today that a former temporary employee of its contractor NTT Nexia illegally stole 5.96 million pieces of personal information.

NTT DOCOMO, the official website of ▲ source NTT, said in an announcement that on March 31, 2023, the company confirmed through network monitoring that the temporary employee accessed the company's internal data through commercial PC on March 30 and illegally extracted business information, including personal information.

The number of messages found by NTT DOCOMO in the initial investigation was 5.29 million, but later investigations showed that the number was about 5.96 million. The information obtained by the temporary employee includes the user's name, address, phone number, date of birth, etc., but does not include credit cards, financial accounts, payment information and various passwords.

At present, NTT DOCOMO has not been able to confirm whether the illegally obtained information has been illegally used by third parties, and the company said it will contact the affected users separately by e-mail or mail.

NTT DOCOMO stressed: "We attach great importance to this incident and will make every effort to address customers' concerns. We will also strive to further strengthen our personal information management system, including our subcontractor personal information management system, so that similar situations do not happen again."

CTOnews.com previously reported that in May, Toyota also announced that about 2.41 million pieces of Japanese customer data (such as vehicle location information) outsourced to its subsidiary Toyota Connected (TC) may have been compromised. Due to the misconfiguration of the cloud environment, these data have been available to the public on the Internet for nearly a decade since 2012.