[ITmedia Business Online] KDDI President Matsuda makes two "apologies" at financial results conference. What did he say about the leak of over 12.23 million email addresses and the fires in Mongolia?

On November 6, KDDI announced its consolidated financial results for the second quarter of the fiscal year ending March 2027. Sales increased by 4.7% year-on-year to 3,052.8 billion yen, and operating income increased by 13.9% to 633.1 billion yen, with both sales and profits increasing in each segment.

In the telecom core business, such as mobile communications, sales increased by 3.1% year on year to 2.201 trillion yen, due to a decline in the short-term cancellation rate within one year and an increase in contracts for higher-end plans.

Sales in the Personal Growth Business, which includes the financial business and energy businesses such as ``au Denki,'' increased by 8.3% year on year to 605.3 billion yen, while sales in the Business Growth Business, which includes AI-related businesses such as data centers, increased by 10.2% to 330.9 billion yen.

What did they say about the Mongolian fires and cyberattacks?

At the beginning of the financial results presentation held on the same day, KDDI President Hiroji Matsuda apologized for the fire related to the activities of Mobicom Corporation (hereinafter referred to as "Mobicom"), a subsidiary of KDDI and a general communications carrier in Mongolia.

“A grassland fire broke out in the Numurg Nature Reserve in Mongolia on October 8th related to the activities of our subsidiary Mobicom.We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Government of Mongolia and the people of Mongolia, as well as to the people who have supported the friendship and progress of our two countries for many years. We sincerely apologize for the great worry and inconvenience caused to everyone involved in this incident.We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the people in Japan and overseas who are working hard to respond to this incident, including those who fought the fire.'' (President Matsuda)

Also, one of the focuses of the briefing was how to respond to cyber attacks. On June 23, KDDI announced that the email system it provides to ISPs had been accessed illegally. Information on 12,233,087 email services provided by ISP providers was leaked.

President Matsuda explained, ``Despite our highly advanced technology, we continued to use old methods and over 10 million email addresses were leaked.We are also working on cybersecurity measures to make use of this experience.'' ``We have been reporting about information leaks recently.We apologize for any inconvenience caused,'' he apologized.

The first measure we cited was management's decision to not hesitate to suspend services if necessary when vulnerabilities were discovered. Although there is a desire to continue providing services to customers on-site, the criteria for making decisions will be different from before, such as suspending services and proceeding with responses depending on the situation.

The second goal is to establish a system that can detect an intrusion early and minimize damage in the unlikely event of an intrusion. Looking back, President Matsuda says, ``At the time, I wondered why I didn't notice that so much information had been omitted.'' From his experience with information leaks, he was keenly aware that delays in detection can lead to more damage.

The starting point for these measures is ``threat intelligence'' efforts to observe and analyze cyber threats. The idea is to advance cybersecurity measures through three processes: prevention, detection, and recovery.