Ex-Nikkei Worker Accused of Leaking Data on 3,000 Employees

July 4, 2018

Tokyo- Nikkei Inc. said Tuesday that the major Japanese business newspaper publisher has filed a criminal complaint against a former employee who was attached to the digital business department at the firm's Tokyo headquarters for allegedly leaking wage and other data on about 3,000 Nikkei employees in violation of the unfair competition prevention law.

The accusation was filed with Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department.

In October 2012, the former employee, 53, disassembled a personal computer of a general administration department staff worker, removed the hard disk from the PC, and sent data contained in the hard disk, including trade secrets such as the dates of birth and standard wages of the 3,000 employees, to a private PC of the accused, according to the company.

At the time, the former employee belonged to the digital marketing division of the newspaper publisher.

The former employee stored the data on a USB flash drive and mailed it to an organization that publishes a monthly newspaper in December 2017.

The data leak came to light as part of the employee data was released on a blog operated by the organization in January this year.

In an internal investigation conducted later by Nikkei, the former employee, dismissed on June 5 this year, was also found to have stored on a private USB memory stick or sent to a private email address data on about 340,000 subscribers to Nikkei's online newspaper and on about 36,000 readers of the Nikkei Veritas, a weekly financial and investment newspaper issued by Nikkei, without authorization between February 2014 and March this year.

The customer information has not been leaked to a third party, according to Nikkei.

"We are deeply sorry for causing concern among readers," the public relations department of Nikkei said. "We will fully cooperate with the police in their investigations and work to prevent any similar incident from happening," it added. Jiji Press