Cyberattack Breaks in and Causes 14 Toyota Factories Suspended, What’s the Best Way to Defend Against Data Security Threat?

On February 28, Toyota Motor Corp claims that they decide to stop production on March 1, suspending 28 product lines in 14 factories owing to the system failure of its supplier Kojima Press Industry Co Ltd.

According to Japanese NHK, problem was found by Kojima Press Industry Co Ltd. on February 26 when they executed internal system checking. Then they shut down the related servers and reported it to Toyota Motor Corp on February 27. Owing to the stopped server, the related order system of Toyota Motor Corp was unable to work. As a result, it finally caused that Toyota Motor Corp’s factories in Japan are completely suspended.

Kojima Press Industry Co Ltd., founded in 1950, is one of the tier one suppliers of Toyota Motor Corp, occupying about 90% share in automotive interior and power-related basic components supply. Meanwhile, it also produces basic components like vehicle battery packs.

From yesterday, Toyota started to recover its business little by little. Owing to the suspending, Toyota might lose the production of about 13000 cars, which is about 5% of the whole production of Toyota Motor Corp in Japan.

Ransomware is not fresh for Toyota. The IT system of Toyota had been “visited” by hackers two years ago.

1. In 2019, the IT system of Toyota and its sale subsidiaries was hacked. Up to 3 million clients’ information is stored in the related server.

2. In 2020, the internal network was hacked by virus and 9 factories were suspended.

3. In 2021, the largest basic components supplier Denso suffered cyberattack. It caused the leakage of employee’s information.

The cyberattack to Japanese Toyota Motor Corp this time is also a warning to enterprises that data security should be improved. Disaster recovery plan should be made in time in case of no ideas when disaster emerges.

Vinchin Anti-ransomware Solution

1. Cross-platform recovery and migration with higher compatibility

The high compatibility of Vinchin Backup & Recovery makes it support cross-platform data recovery across most virtual platforms in the market. For clients who deploy a hybrid cloud environment in the data center, if failure emerged on one virtual platform, the feature cross-platform recovery of Vinchin Backup & Recovery would help you seamlessly migrate or recover the backup data of this platform to another one for effective disaster recovery.

2. Ransomware protection with higher security

Vinchin Backup & Recovery would automatically check the file’s validation, and would not sync the changed data to backup server when the file type is being maliciously modified or encrypted. At the same time, the backup system will monitor and protect data all-roundly in complete period. When ransomware or other malware is trying modifying backup, the visit will be directly refused.

3. Offsite backup copy for better business continuity

Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides Offsite Backup Copy, supporting users to copy local backups to remote backup system. When emergency appears in the local production system, and both production data and local backups are lost at the same time, offsite backup copies could be recovered to either local or remote center for fast business restore, minimizing business loss.

Although Toyota Japanese factories are suspended for only 1 day this time, it still brings massive loss. The increasingly severe cyberattack aggravates the industry agony under the influence of COVID-19 and is also warning enterprises in all industries to pay more attention on data security. As the Cannikin Law said, a bucket's capacity is determined by its shortest stave, while “The shortest stave” of data security needs to be made up by a reliable disaster recovery solution.