Online reservation system handles tickets for Shinkansen’s “Golden Route” and Kyushu.
If you’re planning to take a ride on the Shinkansen, the Smart EX online ticketing service is a handy utility. Managed by Shinkansen operator Central Japan Railway Company/JR Central, Smart EX lets you book seats on bullet trains running in eastern and western Japan, as well as the southwestern island of Kyushu. A wide selection of credit cards can be used for payment, and the Smart EX mobile app can provide you with a QR code so that you don’t have to fuss around with a paper ticket.
Unfortunately, it’s not just travelers that have found Smart EX alluring, but hackers too, as JR Central has announced a data breach has resulted in personal information of roughly 170,000 Smart EX users being leaked.
The incident stems from another security breach earlier this month at Yumirulink, a digital marketing and email forwarding service involved in the routing of some Smart EX messages.
Thankfully, the Smart EX user data that was stolen is of a limited scope. According to JR Central’s statement, hackers were able to obtain the users’ names, email addresses, member IDs/screen names, and membership types. Date of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers and expiration dates were not leaked, the company says. In addition, JR Central says that only the renderings of users’ names in Japanese katakana phonetic characters were leaked, and other forms were not compromised. However, it’s somewhat unclear if this assertion applies only to non-katakana Japanese text (i.e. kanji-character) versions of user names, or if it also is meant to cover names written in the Latin alphabet, since as of this writing the Smart EX website only has a statement regarding the data leak on its Japanese-language page, with no mention of it on the service’s English site.
JR Central’s statement also says that the data breach was not connected to auto-generated emails such as those that Smart EX sends to confirm bookings or customer-initiated schedule changes, and instead is related to emails sent for things such as sale promotions or altered timetable notifications following the recent Kumamoto earthquake.
Collectively, the Smart EX system covers Shinkansen bookings for bullet trains operated by JR Central, JR West, and JR Kyushu, which together stretch from Tokyo through Osaka, Kyoto, and Hiroshima on to Fukuoka and then down to Kagoshima. So if you’ve used the service to book a Shinkansen ticket along that network, it’s probably a good idea to keep an eye on your various other online accounts in the coming days, just in case someone out there has some of your personal data.
Source: Smart EX, Chukyo TV via Yahoo! Japan News via Hachima Kiko, Nitele News
Top image: Pakutaso
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!