SoftBank's IDCF Cloud hit by ransomware; 495 orgs told data's gone

IDC Frontier, the SoftBank subsidiary, says customer data in four zones of its IDCF Cloud probably can't be recovered. Ransomware hit the service at about 3:40 a.m. JST on October 7, and the company told customers they can only restore from backups they hold themselves. In other words, the provider's own backups didn't survive the attack.

The damage is in East Japan Region 1, in the tesla, henry, pascal and joule zones. Virtual servers there stopped and won't restart. 495 companies and local governments are affected. Ibaraki Prefecture, the city of Kodaira, Tobu Zoo and Jiji Press all lost their websites. IDC Frontier cut the region off from the network and turned off management consoles in every region as a precaution. It hasn't confirmed any data leak, the way the attackers got in, or a timeline for restoring service. Customers in unaffected regions are being told to back up their data now.

The owner makes this bigger news. SoftBank owns Arm and is one of OpenAI's largest backers, and it is spending heavily on AI data centers. One of its own clouds just lost customer data to a single ransomware attack.

Why it matters: if your only backup lives with your cloud provider, you may not have a backup.