Recently in Japan, police have arrested a 15-year-old high school student on suspicion of carrying out a cyberattack that fraudulently cancelled more than 46,000 subscriber accounts on Bandai Channel, a Japan-based anime streaming service, according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, which said the student lives in a city near Tokyo.
Teen Utilizes ChatGPT For Bandai Channel Cyberattack
Police said the teenager identified a vulnerability in the platform by analyzing its network traffic, then developed a malicious program with assistance from ChatGPT to initiate the attacks. The student reportedly told investigators he wrote the source code himself, but turned to the AI chatbot when the process was taking too long, saying he “asked ChatGPT and completed it in a different programming language.”
He allegedly sent false commands to the company’s servers on 4 November 2025, causing subscriptions of 46,812 accounts to be cancelled and prompting the temporary suspension of the service. It took Bandai Namco until December last year to fully restore its systems.
The student confessed that he began teaching himself to code around the fourth grade of elementary school. By the time of the incident, when he was in his third year of junior high school, he had discovered the vulnerability in Bandai Namco’s system through close analysis of its communication data, and used ChatGPT to help build the homebrew malware used in the attacks. “I happened to be able to access the information and had nothing against the company,” he said.
This was not the student’s first brush with the law over the case – he was first arrested in June on suspicion of illegally logging into the platform using accounts he unlawfully obtained, before being arrested again in connection with the subscription-cancellation scheme.
Source: Cybernews | The Mainichi | The Asahi Shimbun
Pokdepinion: Some may argue ChatGPT is not the one ultimately responsible, but it sure made things easier for would-be hackers.
