Japan Calls Emergency Meeting As Hackers Hit Again

[William Knowles <erehwon () KIZMIAZ DIS ORG>]

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000125/wl/japan_hackers_1.html

Japan Calls Emergency Meeting As Hackers Hit Again

By Elaine Lies

TOKYO (Reuters) [1.25.2000] - Japan called an emergency meeting
Wednesday to boost computer security after humiliating raids on
government web sites by hackers, who linked one to a pornographic site
and attacked Japan's war record on another.

The announcement came amid revelations that the site at the Science
and Technology Agency had been penetrated twice in two days, and that
key data on another site, including census information, had been
erased.

The hacking came just days after a government meeting at which
officials decided to bring Japan up to U.S. standards of computer
security by 2003 and to draw up a plan to fight ''cyber-terrorism'' by
the end of this year.

These measures will now be enacted as soon as possible over the next
one to two years, the Nihon Keizai newspaper said.

The newest hacker entry left a second message in Chinese -- this time
on the agency homepage -- and again assailed the stand by some
ultra-rightist Japanese groups that the 1937 Nanjing massacre never
happened, the Mainichi newspaper said. The raid was discovered
Wednesday.

The message was virtually identical to one left on a site of the
Management and Coordination Agency Monday -- believed to be the first
such recorded hacker raid on a Japanese government site.

``The Chinese people must speak up to protest against the Japanese
government for refusing to acknowledge the historical misdeed of the
1937 Nanjing Massacre,'' the message read.

A meeting by ultra-rightist Japanese last weekend to try to whitewash
the incident has whipped up new anger in China, where hundreds marched
in Nanjing in protest Tuesday.

Japanese troops killed 300,000 Chinese, mostly civilians, in a
six-week orgy of violence in the southern Chinese city in 1937.  The
Japanese government acknowledges the incident took place.

The Chinese government has lodged a protest against the weekend
meeting.

The government in Osaka, the western Japanese city in which the
meeting was held, said it could not bar the meeting for reasons of
freedom of speech.

Chief government spokesman Mikio Aoki said Wednesday several ministers
would hold a meeting later in the day to discuss the hacker raids,
which have made Japan's computer vulnerability painfully clear.

Derogatory messages, one reportedly saying: ``Japanese are losers,''
appeared on the Science agency's homepage Monday.  The hacker had also
equipped the page with a direct access switch to pornographic web
sites overseas.

Another victim of the hackers was the statistics bureau at the
Management and Coordination Agency, which found Tuesday that all data,
including census and consumer price figures, had been erased from its
site. The information was later retrieved from a backup system.

The government has responded with anger to the wave of raids, calling
them ``deplorable,'' and vowed to conduct stringent investigations,
possibly calling on the U.S. government -- more experienced in
combating hackers -- for help.


==
Some day, on the corporate balance sheet, there will be
an entry which reads, "Information"; for in most cases
the information is more valuable than the hardware which
processes it. -- Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, USN Ret.
==
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/

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