An FX trader lost nearly ¥6 million in about two minutes when someone else's settings took over his automated trading account, and he believes an AI attack was behind it. The account ran on a GMO Internet service, and the company's president has already apologized in tears over a separate breach.
The man, a company employee in his 40s who trades FX on the side, said he noticed something wrong around 4 p.m. on October 21. He was watching his trading screen as losses piled up every few seconds.
“In just two minutes I lost close to ¥6 million.”the man, FX trader
He had been using Oshira.me Desktop Cloud, a GMO Internet service that lets customers connect to a virtual server and run trades automatically around the clock. He said he trusted GMO as having some of the best security in Japan. At first he assumed it was an error, then saw trades going through on settings he had not made.
Two hours later an email arrived. It said the sender was Hacking Team and that GMO had refused to negotiate with them, so, as promised, they had destroyed the balance in the account.
A prime minister's late-night warning
The same day, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi posted an unusual appeal on X at 9:55 p.m., telling the public this was an urgent request. She had been told of a serious vulnerability in PHP, a programming language used on about 90% of websites in Japan.
She urged operators to apply a fix scheduled for release at 11 p.m. as soon as possible, and said that where that was difficult, taking websites offline temporarily was also an effective way to cut the risk.
International journalist Toshihiro Yamada said a cybersecurity firm found two vulnerabilities using models such as OpenAI's. One carried a CVSS score of 9.2, the 0-to-10 scale for the severity of a software flaw, which Yamada said made the situation pressing: a strike on financial institutions or infrastructure would cause major damage.
During the 20 hours before the patch was published, a large volume of unauthorized access believed to have used AI was detected, Yamada said.
Defenses built for a slower attacker
The two episodes point at the same problem. A flaw can be found, exploited and turned into a loss faster than the people running the systems can respond, and the warning itself has to go out at night with a deadline attached.
GMO Internet Group has been hit by cyberattacks, and personal information has leaked from a series of well-known companies. President Masatoshi Kumagai apologized in tears at a news conference.