The intruder who broke into GMO Internet's foreign-exchange cloud service shut down a dark web site within just a few hours, and why remains unexplained, according to an analysis by Mark Karpeles, the former chief executive of the collapsed bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.
Karpeles, 41, is known for the 2014 disappearance of bitcoins from Mt. Gox. He examined the traces the attacker left behind, Daily Shincho reported.
GMO Internet Group president Masatoshi Kumagai, 63, held a press conference on November 2 over unauthorized access to Onamae.com Desktop Cloud, a cloud service the company offers through its Onamae.com domain business.
At the conference Kumagai acknowledged that experts had flagged problems with the system two years earlier. "It is also a fact that we had received indications from experts about issues in the system," he said, according to Daily Shincho.
A suspect who could be Chinese, Russian or Japanese
Speculation has circulated that the attacker was Chinese, Russian or Japanese. Karpeles argued that pinning down the culprit requires first sorting out how the attack was carried out.
The target was the FX trading cloud service that GMO Internet provides under the Onamae.com name.
Karpeles's central question is why the attacker closed the dark web site after only a few hours. The source does not say what the site was used for, what the traces consisted of, or how Karpeles reached his conclusion.
The press conference left many questions unresolved, and the analysis points to a gap between what the company disclosed and what the attacker's movements show.