Toyota to resume plant operations from Wednesday, following system failure at a domestic supplier

Japanese automaker Toyota has decided to resume all operations from Wednesday, following ‘system failure’ at one of its domestic suppliers brought about by a suspected cyberattack. As a result of this, the company halted operations across its plants in the country on Tuesday. There were no immediate details of the nature and extent of the attack, or the measures taken by Toyota to address the cyber threat situation.

“Due to a system failure at a domestic supplier (KOJIMA INDUSTRIES CORPORATION), we suspended our operations on all 28 lines at 14 domestic plants in Japan today, Tuesday, March 1,” Toyota said in a media statement. “However, we have decided to resume all operations from the first shift tomorrow, Wednesday, March 2. Working together with our suppliers, we will make every effort to deliver vehicles to our customers as soon as possible,” it added.

Attempting to analyze what Toyota solved by shutting operations across its domestic plants for a day, Andrew Jenkinson, group chief executive officer at Cybersec Innovation Partners said “panic, chaos and scurrying around to try and identify critical systems that are compromised to renew or replace. Apart from that, very little.”

As cyberattacks are not always so straight-forward and Toyota has not revealed what was the nature of the system failure that affected its supplier, when Jenkinson was asked what could have been the nature of the system failure that affected Toyota’s supplier, he told Industrial Cyber that the automaker has “maintained woeful basic security for over 18 months as our evidence shows. The Third-Party supplier may have suffered an attack as a consequence of Toyota’s own security incompetence and basic security negligence,” he added.

Looking into the consequences of Toyota’s ‘band-aid’ approach to its own cybersecurity position, after one of its major suppliers was targeted in a suspected cyberattack, Jenkinson identified “Continued digital intrusion and ‘Living off the Land.

He also said that Toyota is sadly not alone in overlooking basic Internet security.

“This week’s attacks on Russian Government and Banking by the group Anonymous showed the world when they attacked 300 websites, that websites are being used to gain access to networks and infrastructures. Websites are frequently the weakest link,” Jenkinson added.

Anna Ribeiro

Industrial Cyber News Editor. Anna Ribeiro is a freelance journalist with over 14 years of experience in the areas of security, data storage, virtualization and IoT.