Police Arrest 17-Yr-Old over Cyberattack on Net Cafe Operator

Tokyo, Dec. 4 (Jiji Press)–Tokyo police served an arrest warrant on a 17-year-old boy on Thursday for allegedly carrying out a cyberattack on the operator of the Kaikatsu Club internet cafe chain. The Metropolitan Police Department charged the second-year high school student from the western Japan city of Osaka with alleged violation of the law against unauthorized computer access and fraudulent obstruction of business. He has admitted to the charges, telling investigators that it was fun to find vulnerabilities in systems. According to the MPD, the boy fraudulently obtained about 7.25 million sets of Kaikatsu Club membership information with a computer program he created using the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot. No misuse of the membership information has been confirmed. Kaikatsu Club cafes also offer comic books, karaoke and other services. The boy allegedly conspired with an unidentified accomplice to breach the server of an app managed by the internet cafe chain operator, Kaikatsu Frontier Inc., and repeatedly send fraudulent commands to obtain membership information between Jan. 18 and 20. He is suspected of obstructing the company’s business by forcing it to temporarily suspend some of the app’s functions. The MPD believes the suspect was able to get responses from ChatGPT for creating and modifying his hacking program by avoiding direct language on cyberattacks in his prompts. He issued an advance notice of his cyberattack and reported its success live on social media. The boy began learning programming when he was an elementary school student, and has won an award in a cybersecurity technology competition. Kaikatsu Frontier said in March that some 7.29 million sets of Kaikatsu Club members’ private information, such as names and addresses, may have been compromised. The boy’s involvement in the cyberattack came to light during an MPD investigation into another group of minors in February. He was arrested in November for allegedly purchasing trading cards featuring Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon, using someone else’s credit card. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]