Japan Post: unauthorized access to the web service for international mail inquiries

On September 25 Japan Post said the server of its web service for international mail inquiries had been accessed from outside without authorization, and stopped the service. Its update on October 16 said names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of senders and recipients, tracking numbers and more in about 600 registrations could be viewed by third parties; whether anyone viewed them is not known. The service's mail account was also used to send spam, about 520,000 messages from mid-July to September 25 according to Kyodo News. The registered data was not used as spam recipients, the company said.