SoftBank

Ransomware Attack on SoftBank's IDCF Cloud Encrypts 3.6PB in 7 Minutes as Operations Team Misses Alerts for 7 Hours

SoftBank subsidiary IDC Frontier suffered a ransomware attack on its IDCF Cloud East Japan Region 1 that encrypted 3.6PB of primary storage across 239 hypervisors and 225 datastores in just seven minutes. Attackers also destroyed 554,153 snapshots, eliminating 41.5PB of backup capacity and leaving 495 enterprise and government customers without recoverable data from the provider. Operations staff spent the next seven hours repeatedly rebooting already-encrypted virtual machines and resetting console passwords while failing to locate any of the 225 RECOVER-INFO.txt ransom notes left in datastore root directories. The intrusion was only confirmed after the threat actors directly defaced the vCenter management console with the message “IDCF CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE SEIZED”. The incident highlights critical gaps in asset inventory, log monitoring, and incident response procedures rather than any zero-day exploit. No ransom was paid; the provider instead focused on public updates while advising customers to rely on their own off-site backups.