China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say
China hacked Japan’s sensitive defense networks, officials say
According to former US and Japanese officials, the NSA discovered in the fall of 2020 that the PRC had persistent access to Japanese Defense Networks.
This prompted a bilateral engagement to enhance Japanese Network security.
Kind of scary to think about all the state hacking going on that hasn't yet been revealed.
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.
Oh jeez, the security nightmares I've seen here keep me up at night. You're doing good work, fixing what you could from the inside of where you worked.
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In the fall of 2020, the National Security Agency made an alarming discovery: Chinese military hackers had compromised classified defense networks of the United States’ most important strategic ally in East Asia.
“Japan and the United States are currently facing the most challenging and complex security environment in recent history,” Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said at a news conference with President Biden in Washington in January.
The United States was debating how to respond to the massive Russian “SolarWinds” hack, which was uncovered during the Trump administration and had sowed malicious code and enabled cyberspies to steal information from several major U.S. government agencies.
“The government of Japan intends to strengthen its cybersecurity response capabilities to be equal to or surpass the level of leading Western countries,” Noriyuki Shikata, Kishida’s cabinet press secretary, said in an interview.
“Both within and beyond Asia, Japan faces more diverse threats and more complex international responsibilities, which call for intelligence that provides a better understanding of its national security needs,” stated the report, written by a bipartisan study group including foreign policy experts Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye.
Sensitive commercial and classified material has been stolen, the NSA’s own top-secret hacking tools have been released into the wild, Hollywood studios have been coerced and embarrassed, and the United States’ democracy has been assaulted.
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