It has been reported that on June 21, a flash drive containing personal information of over 460 thousand people of the city of Amagasaki was lost by an employee working on the subsidy for those whose lives have been affected by covid. Click here to read the report by NHK in Japanese.

Further reports show that this employee got himself drunk in a restaurant in Osaka, and slept on the road for around 3 hours, before he realized that he lost the flash drive.

More ridiculousness is to come later on the press conference held by the city of Amagasaki. On the conference, it was confirmed that the flash drive had been protected with password. However, later in the answers to the press, the city revealed that the password is a 13-letter-string with a word of 9 letters (the first in upper case) and 4 numbers. It seemed that the city is trying to calm the public through bragging the security measures, but the information they provided is already so sufficient that the time needed to crack the password with brutal force is greatly reduced.

Back to the trending tags, パスワード is the transliteration of password, USBメモリ means a USB flash drive (literally meaning USB memory). These are some frequently mentioned keywords in the discussion of this incident. Also, there are some posts saying that Amagasaki2022 matches the description perfectly, and that whoever has the flash drive might already cracked it. This also causes amagasaki2022 to trend together with the previous phrases.