Are you a member of the Puroland Club? If so, bad news: your personal information may have just been leaked.
Sanrio Entertainment – whose parent company owns popular characters such as Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Kuromi – investigated what appeared to be a site outage this week, according to NTV. IT personnel discovered that the site had been hacked and infected with ransomware, a type of virus that takes control of critical systems and won’t relinquish it unless the victim pays the attacker.
Sanrio operates Puroland, the amusement park for Sanrio characters in the city of Tama, Tokyo. The reports say that, as part of the intrusion, the records of up to two million customers who subscribed to the Puroland Club and who purchased a yearly passport, as well as the information of employees and clients, may have been leaked. The information includes customers’ names and addresses.
As of this writing, the site for the Puroland Club Passport is still temporarily down. The Japanese version of puroland.jp is redirecting the Passport page to a page labeled /passport_temporary, and it carries a message saying that, “due to network trouble,” customers currently can’t buy theme park tickets or e-passports.
Sanrio says there’s no danger or risk to the parent company and that the intrusion is limited to Sanrio Entertainment’s systems. According to NHK, no financial data has been leaked either.
Sanrio Entertainment has apologized and vows to take steps to strengthen its security going forward.
Cyberattacks on Japanese companies aren’t uncommon. Last year, a ransomware attack on popular video site Niconico took the service down for two months.
Why this page doesn't look like crap
You may notice a few things about this page. First, it’s mostly content – not ads. Second, this article was written by a human, not a plagiaristic Turing machine.
Unseen Japan is a collective of independent authors. We work hard to keep our content free of intrusive ads and AI slop.Â
Help us keep it that way. Donate to the Unseen Japan Journalism Fund to support our work. Regular donors will receive Insider, our paid newsletter with weekly bonus content about Japan. Plus, your contribution will help us produce more content like this.
What to read next
Japan Prefectural Forensics Expert Falsified DNA Results For Seven Years
Police have fired the 40-something examiner and filed criminal charges in 13 cases for falsifying evidence and official reports.
Tokyo’s Sento Are Opening Their Arms to Foreign Tourists
Tokyo and the Tokyo Sento Association want more tourists (tattooed or otherwise!) to experience this aspect of traditional Japanese culture.
“Zombie Cigarettes” Are Japan’s New Recreational Drug Scare
The increasing popularity of the drug has some in the country calling for a complete ban on vaping to stop it in its tracks.
