CYBERSECURITY | Japanese banks face rising vulnerabilities as AI threats grow
The Japanese government announced Project YATA-Shield in May, bringing together 14 ministries and agencies to strengthen defenses at financial institutions.
Several major Japanese banks detected twice as many system vulnerabilities this summer as they did a year earlier, prompting institutions to accelerate patching and consider voluntary service suspensions if fixes cannot be completed in time, according to a report by Nikkei cited by Keeper Security.
Takanori Nishiyama, senior vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan country manager at Keeper Security, said the increase highlights the pressure that advanced AI is placing on vulnerability discovery and cybersecurity teams.
“Frontier AI has changed the pace of vulnerability discovery across the financial sector, and Japanese banks are now facing the pressure in their own systems,” Nishiyama said.
Japan’s Financial Services Agency and Bank of Japan asked financial institutions in May to treat frontier AI as a management issue and establish criteria for proactively suspending services, according to Nishiyama.
The Japanese government also announced Project YATA-Shield in May, bringing together 14 ministries and agencies to strengthen defenses at financial institutions, with plans to extend the effort across 15 critical infrastructure sectors. The Japanese Bankers Association has acknowledged that banks may need to suspend services, including automated teller machines, to protect customer assets, Nishiyama said.
He said identity security becomes critical when vulnerabilities are discovered faster than organizations can patch them. Attackers who exploit unpatched systems may seek privileged credentials and other secrets stored in code or configuration files to expand their access across networks.
Financial institutions must account for privileged access held not only by human administrators but also by service accounts, application programming interfaces and AI agents, Nishiyama said. He recommended removing unnecessary standing privileges and adopting just-in-time access that expires when a task ends to limit the potential impact of a breach.
Nishiyama also cited guidance from Japan’s financial regulators to remove unnecessary privileged IDs and protect every privileged account with multifactor authentication.
Privileged access management tools can apply least-privilege controls, approval workflows, audit trails and rapid access revocation to both human and nonhuman identities, he said. These measures can help banks restrict an attacker’s ability to move through systems after exploiting a vulnerability.
“Suspending services would protect customer assets, but it would also disrupt the reliability Japanese customers expect from their banks,” Nishiyama said. “The more tightly institutions control privileged access across both human and non-human identities today, the less likely they are to face that choice.”
Full disclosure: All news articles published on the TechSabado website are written by human journalists, unless otherwise specified. Final text editing is also performed by human editors, with artificial intelligence (AI) used only to assist with additional grammar and style guide corrections..
————————————————————————-
TEN YEARS OF TECHSABADO!
PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE & SPOTIFY channels.
WATCH TECHSABADO ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL:
WE ARE ALSO ON SPOTIFY
WATCH OUR OTHER YOUTUBE CHANNELS:
PLEASE LIKE our FACEBOOK PAGE and SUBSCRIBE to OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL.
