Security in IT here in Japan has largely been an afterthought or security theatre. Passwords stored in plaintext are not uncommon (I’ve signed up for things and had my password in plaintext sent in email back to me). It seems to be getting better slowly. My current company has a whole security division, which is a nice change.

NDAs prevent me from being too specific, but I worked previously at another company in Japan that refused to hire security staff or even pay for the occasional pen test and audit. I fixed everything I could find on my own, but I highly doubt that there were no other issues left as I’m not a security pro.

Then you have things like https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46222026 – the cyber security MP has never used a computer. Even if their job is mostly to appoint the right people and manage that sort of thing, they still are doing a clearly terrible job of it.