The Port of Nagoya, Japan's largest port was paralyzed by a suspected Russian cyberattack, on July 4, 2023, at around 6:30 am local time. This disrupted cargo as operators scrambled to prevent wider delays to shipments. The port, located in central Japan, accounts for 10% of Japan's total trade value, handling Toyota exports and imports, as well as cargo containing food and household appliances. On Wednesday morning, the Nagoya Port Transportation Authority announced that cargo operations had been suspended following an incident that impacted the Nagoya United Terminal System (NUTS), the computer system used to operate the port's five cargo terminals.
Ransomware - used by hackers to lock access to files or systems unless payment is made, resulted in an outage at the Nagoya Port Transportation Authority on Tuesday morning. The Nagoya port authority said that the Russia-based ransomware group Lockbit 3.0 was responsible for the hack. According to Mihoko Matsubara, the ransomware attackers targeted vulnerabilities in VPN and remote desktop protocols. The port authority reportedly received a ransom demand - printed on one of its office printers.
Port authorities are working to restore the NUTS system by 18:00 today and plan to resume operations at 08:30 tomorrow. By then, all container loading and unloading operations at terminals using trailers will have been canceled, causing huge financial losses to the port and severe disruption to the circulation of goods to and from Japan. The Nagoya Port Authority has dealt with cyberattacks before, but it seems that this attack had the biggest impact. On September 6, 2022, the port's website was unreachable for about 40 minutes due to a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack launched by the pro-Russian group Killnet. The threat actor behind the ransomware attack on Nagoya Port remains unknown as no threat actor has publicly claimed the intrusion.
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