Hackers compromised Japanese government offices via Fujitsu ‘s ProjectWEB tool

Threat actors have compromised offices of multiple Japanese agencies via Fujitsu ‘s ProjectWEB information sharing tool.

Threat actors have breached the offices of multiple Japanese agencies after they have gained access to projects that uses the Fujitsu ‘s ProjectWEB information sharing tool.

ProjectWEB is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for enterprise collaboration and file-sharing that was provided by Fujitsu.

Fujitsu confirmed the security breach and revealed that the attackers have also stolen some customer data belonging to multiple government entities. At the time of this writing, it is not clear how the hackers have compromised the service neither who is behind the attacks.

The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism, the Cabinet Secretariat, and the Narita Airport are some of the agencies impacted by the attack.

Data exfiltrated by the hackers included government employees’ records and contractors’ data stored in the platform.

The Cabinet Cyber ​​Security Center (NISC) launched an investigation into the incident, Fujitsu experts first detected the intrusion early this week, on May 24.

Fujitsu shut down the ProjectWEB platform in response to the incident.

“Recently, some projects that use “Project WEB”, which is a tool for sharing information with related parties inside and outside the company when operating the project, have been illegally accessed by a third party and saved in the tool. It turned out that some of the information entrusted to us by our customers was stolen.” reads the data breach notice published by the Japanese firm. “The scope and cause of this incident are currently under investigation, and the operation of “Project WEB” has been suspended to prevent further unauthorized access.”

According to the media, the land, infrastructure and transport ministry reported that at least 76,000 email addresses of its employees and business partners were leaked.

In April, a malicious campaign exploited two vulnerabilities,tracked as CVE-2020-5639 and CVE-2021-20655, in the popular file-sharing server FileZen to steal sensitive data from businesses and government organizations.

The ProjectWEB breach comes after Japanese government agencies were targeted in similar attacks earlier this year. The previous attacks targeted FileZen file-sharing servers made by Soliton, which are also broadly used by Japanese government agencies.

The attacks are part of a large-scale campaign that also resulted in unauthorized access to a Soliton file shared storage used by the Japanese Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office staff.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Le Monde Parallèle)