Toyota Restarts Operations After Cyber Attack
Tokyo, March 2: Toyota Motor Corp on Wednesday said operations at all of its domestic plants had been resumed after being suspended a day earlier due to one of its suppliers being hit by a cyber attack.
The Nagoya-based automaker said that after it had restored its production data system it restarted operations at 14 of its suspended assembly plants. The system data was connected to one of its domestic suppliers of plastic parts, Kojima Industries Corp, which had experienced equipment glitches. Toyota said on Wednesday that the computer system failure at Kojima had not yet been completely fixed. Kojima Industries confirmed its computer server system had suffered a virus attack. The parts supplier said a message of a threatening nature was also found, raising suspicions the firm had been attacked by ransomware. It was reported on Saturday evening that the supplier’s servers stopped working.
Toyota said that shuttering its operations for the day affected the output of roughly 13,000 vehicles, which equates to about 5 per cent of its monthly production. Kojima Industries, staffed by roughly 1,600 workers, made the government aware of the attack and contacted the police. Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a press briefing on the matter Tuesday that an investigation has been launched into the Toyota-linked cyber attack.
