Tokyo police arrested two men on Sunday for allegedly obtaining client data from Internet service provider Softbank BB Corp, in a massive leakage of such data that came to light in January, investigative sources said.
The two unemployed Tokyo men had threatened to leak the private information of customers of Yahoo BB broadband Internet service provider.
Mainichi Shimbun reports:
Police said Mori and Tomiyasu were acquainted as hackers. In January this year, they went to a Shinjuku-ku Internet cafe armed with passwords and ID numbers given to them by a man who worked for Softbank BB as a temporary worker and used them to break into the Yahoo BB database. Softbank BB operates Yahoo BB.
Mori and Tomiyasu stole personal details of about 4.6 million people registered with Yahoo BB, then copied them on a CD and DVD.
Mori is accused of handing the data over to his father-in-law, Hiroshi Mori, 67, a political organization leader who, together with 62-year-old Yahoo BB agency boss Teruaki Yuasa, is currently standing trial for also attempting to extort the huge online service provider.
Yutaka Tomiyasu, 24, and Takuya Mori, 35 — were formally arrested on charges of attempted extortion in connection with the leakage of data on about 4.6 million subscribers to the company’s Internet connection service Yahoo! BB.
