IDC Frontier, a major Japanese cloud and digital-infrastructure provider, disclosed that its IDCF Cloud service was hit by a ransomware attack that began at 03:40 local time on 7 October and forced it to shut down network and systems, causing an outage in its East Japan Region 1 data-centre cluster. The company said the disruption was caused "by a ransomware attack by a third party," that it is still establishing the precise cause and scope, and that the incident affects 495 companies and local governments using the service. No group has been publicly attributed. An outage at a regional cloud cluster serving government tenants tests customers' resilience arrangements as much as the provider's incident response, and the affected-tenant count makes this one of the larger cloud-availability events of the month — relevant to any Australian organisation with Japanese regional dependencies.

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