DeadMellox of Team GhostShell explains why the country's systems are an easy target

Nov 12, 2012 10:16 GMT  ·  By

We’ve had the opportunity to do an interview with DeadMellox, a member of Team GhostShell – the hacker collective that has made a lot of headlines after leaking millions of sensitive records from organizations worldwide, including China and Russia.

In September, the hackers focused their efforts on the world’s top 100 universities. Since some of the targeted organizations were from Japan, the country announced that it would launch an investigation into the matter.

However, DeadMellox claims that the breaches which affected the universities should be Japan’s least concern, considering that they have serious issues when it comes to the overall state of cyber security.

“If someone wants to attack them seriously, it will end in total disaster. First off, they're not prepared in terms of cybernetic laws or personnel to combat such actions. Right now they're putting together a 100-man team of security experts, as I'm sure you already know,” the hacker said.

“They are scheduled to go fully operational in 2013. Too bad no one told some of them not to go on Twitter with made accounts since they might get doxed.”

Furthermore, he claims that their entire cyberspace is “dangerously vulnerable.”

“When I first started looking into it, around the beginning of the year, I thought they had some sort of unique ways of hiding their vulnerabilities through all kinds of modules,” he explained.

“After a few weeks or so of raging at people in chat rooms about it, since no one else knew anything either, I decide to analyze the modules themselves. One of their favorites is the 'pico' module. Turns out they aren't better patched, but extremely outdated.”

DeadMellox has emphasized the fact that even China has some outdated servers but, apparently, the situation is far worse in Japan.