Asahi Group Holdings: Stop Damage Caused by Personal Information Leak

Editorial

15:37 JST, November 28, 2025

The cyberattack on major beer and beverage company Asahi Group Holdings, Ltd., has escalated into a large-scale leak of personal information, spreading the damage.

While focusing every possible effort on recovering from the system failure, the company must minimize the misuse of the leaked information.

Asahi suffered a large-scale system failure starting from Sept. 29 after being hit by a cyberattack that used ransomware, which is malware sent by attackers who demand money in exchange for restoring data. On Nov. 27, President Atsushi Katsuki held the first press conference since the outage, explaining the details of the cyberattack and future countermeasures.

The serious part is that it was found that personal information on a total of about 1.91 million people could have been leaked.

This includes names, addresses and phone numbers of individuals who contacted the company’s customer service centers, as well as information on employees, their families and retired individuals, among others, according to the company.

Katsuki said, “We have not confirmed any instance of this data being published on the internet.”

Asahi said that it has newly established a contact point for inquiries about the information leak and reported it to the government’s Personal Information Protection Commission. It is hoped that the company will work to thoroughly prevent illicit use of the information in cooperation with the government and will advise customers and others with care.

It has also been found that the tactics used in the cyberattack were extremely sophisticated. The attacker stole the password of the data center by infiltrating network equipment within the group.

In addition, the attacker repeatedly hacked into servers by fraudulently using administrator privileges, the company said.

Although Asahi had introduced a system to detect unauthorized access, a hacker group believed to be based in Russia likely breached the defenses. Katsuki said, “The attack was so sophisticated that we couldn’t detect it.” But it must be said that its measures were inadequate.

Meanwhile, the hacker group released a statement claiming responsibility for the attack in early October.

Regarding the possibility of a demand for a ransom to restore data, Katsuki stated that the company had not had contact with the group, adding, “Even if a demand had been made, we probably wouldn’t have paid it.”

Yielding to threats from the criminal group could intensify its attacks. It is quite right that Asahi has maintained a firm stance.

Asahi has numerous business partners, including restaurants and supermarkets. While orders are being taken via phone and other routes due to the prolonged system failure, beer shipments have been delayed, leading to persistent shortages on store shelves. The company has also been forced to restrict shipments of food and other products.

Normalization of delivery and other operations is expected to take until February next year. The hope is that Asahi will speed up system restoration by investigating the source of the virus infection and implementing additional security measures.

(From The Yomiuri Shimbun, Nov. 28, 2025)