One of Japan’s largest public universities shut down a large share of its IT estate after a suspected ransomware intrusion, canceling classes and taking roughly 500 servers offline.
Osaka Metropolitan University told staff it believed ransomware triggered the outage, which knocked out email, internal networks and systems handling academic administration, financial accounting, payroll, human resources and library services. Investigators brought in outside specialists. No gang has been named and no ransom demand has been confirmed.
Japanese outlets reported that information tied to at least 130,000 current and former students, faculty and affiliates may have been exposed, spanning names, addresses and email addresses, plus records inherited from Osaka Prefecture University and Osaka City University, which merged in 2022 to create OMU. The school has not confirmed data theft and referred the matter to Japan’s data protection authority.
Critically for patient care, the electronic medical record system at the university hospital kept running and medical services continued, as did the veterinary clinical center. Entrance exam and enrollment portals, hosted externally, stayed up too. The disruption forced in-person classes to pause through at least Thursday, a reminder that even a medical university’s administrative backbone is a clinical dependency.
