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.
Any cultural or infrastructural reasons as to why Japan is not good at cybersecurity?
We still use FAX. No, seriously.
While it isn’t ubiquitous here in Australia by any means, fax still occupies some weird areas of law that make it common. When my doctor sends a referral it is almost always via fax, because email isn’t legal. Apparently, owning a phone number is more proof than owning an email address?
What’s hilarious is that most medical providers use fax-over-VoIP (yes, that’s apparently the term) anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Same in the US, doctors offices want everything done by fax. Because security.
Nothing to do with security. Everything to do with olds not wanting to learn anything new. I had a client, a doctor, do early retirement instead of move his paper files into and EMR system. Because he didn’t want to learn it. Kind of like appointing a boomer with zero IT experience to the head of cybersecurity. Any country that is short sighted enough to pull that shit deserves to have their networks wrecked.
EMR systems aren’t FOSS, so I’d be reluctant too.
Whatever security benefits there may be in fax are completely defeated if you send it over VoIP.
I was being sarcastic about the security thing.
fax over VoIP has to be the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard
I think this article is enlightening on Japan’s cybersecurity. Things may have changed but people like this being in charge put them way behind.
never used computer
Cybersecurity minister
Sakurada has been in office just over a month, after being appointed in a cabinet reshuffle following Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s reelection
had to check when the article was written at this one lol
This link is to the same article. Was there a reason for posting it?
Gift link to get past paywall.
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
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.
Good bot
