Osaka Metropolitan University (OMU) has canceled classes and taken a large part of its IT infrastructure offline after a suspected ransomware attack. The university said the outage left its internal network, email, and a range of administrative and academic systems unavailable. It is investigating with outside cybersecurity specialists, but has not identified the attackers or confirmed receiving a ransom demand.
Japanese media reported that about 500 servers stopped operating. Information belonging to at least 130,000 current and former students, faculty members, and others may have been exposed, including names, addresses, and email addresses, as well as data from Osaka Prefecture University and Osaka City University, which merged in 2022 to form OMU. The university has not confirmed that personal data was stolen and said it is still investigating.
The disruption affected academic administration, educational support, financial accounting, payroll, human resources, library services, and the university's websites. Classes are canceled through at least Thursday, with in-person classes planned to resume Friday and online classes to restart depending on system recovery. The university hospital's electronic medical record system and its veterinary clinical center remained operational, and externally hosted systems for entrance exam applications and enrollment were unaffected.
OMU has reported the incident to Japan's data protection authority and other government agencies. The report notes that several other Japanese companies have recently disclosed cyber incidents, but there is no evidence that they are connected to this attack.