Notices

Japan International Cooperation Center(JICE), which developed and manage the Portal site of ‘Master's Degree and Internship Program of African Business Education Initiative for Youth (ABE Initiative)’ based on the contracts with JICA, announced the detection of unauthorized accesses to the Portal site of ABE Initiative.

It was identified that the leakage of email addresses and log-in passwords of 1,219 ABE Initiative participants and ex-participants, 6 applicants, 652 staff members of accepting universities, 102 African youths who made inquiries to the Program in the past, 2 staff members of JICA and 3 staff members of JICE (total 1,984 users).

JICE sent out e-mails to affected users to explain the detail of the case and to apologize.

The detailed outline of the case is as follows;
(1) From late April 2020, JICE ran a vulnerability assessment on the Portal site of ABE Initiative to upgrade and strengthen our security.
(2) JICE discovered the vulnerability on the Portal site during the process of the assessment, and confirmed the unauthorized accesses after the log review. JICE also confirmed that no other personal information than email addresses and log-in passwords of above mentioned 1,984 persons had been accessed.
(3) The Portal site is currently closed and cannot be accessed. JICE is running full log review back to when the Portal site was established.

JICA tender the deepest apologies to all affected users for the concern and inconvenience this has caused as a supervising position.
We take this case very seriously and will exert our utmost efforts to prevent the recurrence.

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