On Thursday, June 26, 2009, the former acting manager for Mitsubishi UFJ Securities Company was arrested by Tokyo police for data theft committed in February of this year. Hideaki Kubo, 44, stole personal data on approximately 1.5 million customers and proceeded to sell some of their personal information to mailing list companies. He was fired in April when news of his theft reached management at Mitsubishi.
Kubo has admitted to the allegations of theft and illegal data access. He used the access credentials of a female contractor for the company to gain entry to the customer database and steal the information. The contractor had been moved to a different department, but her access privileges had not yet been revoked for the customer information database.
After retrieving data on Mitsubishi’s entire client list, Kubo then copied the information to a server and burned it to a CD. He took the CD home and used his personal computer to sell some of the data to mailing lists, collecting about 328,000 yen (about 3,407 USD). Kubo, who violated the Law on the Prohibition of Unauthorized Computer Access, faces a maximum of one year in prison or a fine of up to 500,000 yen (about 5,194 USD). He will also be charged with the theft of the 65-yen CD he stole from company supplies to which he copied the information.
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