September 24, 2020
Revised September 25, 2020

We have found that the PC of an Azbil Corporation / azbil Group employee was infected by the Emotet* computer virus after the employee opened a fake e-mail that appeared to be sent from one of our customers.

Because of this incident, e-mail supposedly coming from the azbil Group or one of its employees and containing the Emotet virus may have been sent to parties who have dealt with an azbil Group company in the past.
If you received an e-mail in the name of one of our employees with an attached zip file on or after September 17, please check the e-mail address of the sender, and if it is not actually from the azbil Group (@azbil.com), or if you checked with our employee and the employee did not send the e-mail, please delete it without opening it.
The situation is currently under investigation, but to prevent the spread of the virus we have shut down our network and e-mail system. It will take some time until the investigation is complete. Until then, e-mail to or from the azbil Group via the Internet will not reach the recipient. We will make a further announcement about this matter as soon as our systems have recovered.

As of Friday, September 25, 2020, 13:30 (JST), our network connection is back to normal, and the e-mail system is incrementally resuming operation.

We deeply apologize for any inconvenience caused to our customers and related parties.

Note: Emotet is a computer virus that steals e-mail information from the infected PC and uses that information to spread the virus via e-mail. Anyone who opens the attached file or clicks the URL in the e-mail will be infected by Emotet. A new variety of the virus has also been created that cannot be prevented by existing measures.