Japanese virtual desktop cloud hacked so hard it asks to be banned

Japanese ISP GMO Internet has warned customers the cloudy desktop service it offers as an ideal foreign exchange trading environment was compromised by an attacker, and that it had been slow to improve the service's security.

GMO runs a service called Onamae.com Desktop Cloud and last week admitted “a third party had installed malicious programs in the server environments of some customers.” That’s never welcome news but is an especially poor outcome because the servers host cloudy Windows desktops that GMO recommends customers use to host foreign exchange trading applications.

In later updates the company revealed that some customers reported “unauthorized operations were performed on their trading accounts” and advised that third parties had probably seen users’ passwords for trading services.

The next day, the company advised users to immediately change passwords for their trading accounts, and to do so using a device that they don’t use for trading.

The company has since admitted that its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service’s …