Japan has declared its first-ever cyberspace emergency. The move came on 9 October 2026 after a wave of ransomware attacks powered by artificial intelligence. More than 14 million citizens had their personal details exposed.
The year-to-date total has now passed 500 incidents for the first time. That is more than the 473 incidents recorded across all of 2025. Officials say the speed of the attacks is what makes them so dangerous.
Officials say a small group of hackers can now hit far more targets because AI handles part of the work. One cloud-provider attack spread through 495 businesses in just hours. September alone saw 86 cyber incidents, a 37 percent jump from July.
September alone saw 86 cyber incidents, a 37 percent jump from July.
The IDCF Cloud attack
The worst incident hit IDC Frontier’s IDCF Cloud on 7 October. The ransomware attack began at 3:40 in the morning and knocked out the East Japan Region 1 data centre. It affected 495 companies and local governments.
The company later warned that data across four zones of the centre may be hard or impossible to recover. Customers who kept their own backups outside the cloud may be the only ones who get their data back.
A new kind of threat
Cybersecurity officials described the attacks as saturation attacks. They exploit AI to strike many targets at once. This is very different from the careful, targeted attacks of the past ten years.
Japan’s National Cybersecurity Office has sent mandatory security orders to all government ministries. The orders must be passed on to local governments and private companies across the country.
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