February 9, 2024 Administrative Guidance to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corporation

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) today issued written administrative guidance to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corporation (corporate number 7120001077523, headquartered in Osaka, Osaka Prefecture and headed by MORIBAYASHI Hideaki, President and CEO) regarding a review of its supervision of contractors and strengthening of measures.

1. Background, etc.

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corporation (hereafter referred to as “NTT West”) outsourced its telemarketing operations to NTT Marketing Act ProCX (hereafter referred to as “ProCX”). An employee involved in the operation and maintenance services at NTT Business Solutions Corporation (hereafter referred to as “BS”), which provided the call center system used by ProCX for conducting the outsourced work, exploited a system administrator account to access servers where NTT West’s customer data was stored. From 2014, for approximately eight years, this employee illicitly extracted customer data and leaked it to third parties.
According to the report from NTT West, ProCX’s use of BS’s call center system fell under the outsourcing of personal data handling, yet NTT West failed to recognize this fact. NTT West assumed that its outsourcing did not fall under the scope of outsourcing as defined in usual outsourcing agreements or other agreements. It was found that NTT West’s supervision of ProCX was inadequate. For example, ProCX was not subject to the supervision measures for subcontractors.

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  NTT West’s 100% subsidiaries.

2. Details of measures, etc.

Today, MIC issued administrative guidance to NTT West in writing (see the attachment), requesting NTT West to implement the following items and to report on the status of implementation.

1. 1.
   Review of the supervision of contractors and strengthening of measures
2. 2.
   Thorough user support