14 DAY TRIAL // A total of 33 anti-nuclear citizens groups from Japan have been the target of a coordinated cyberattack. The list of targets includes the Fukushima Genpatsu Kokusodan, the Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes, and the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace.
According to The Asahi Shimbun, the organizations received a total of over 2.53 million emails between mid-September and early November 2013.
The attackers obtained an email address of the targeted organization and used it to sign up for newsletters or to make inquiries with other anti-nuclear groups. By utilizing specialized tools, the cybercriminals repeated the process between 2 and 300 times per minute.
Each time the process is repeated, the website sends registration confirmation emails to the inboxes of the targeted organization. This results in a denial of service (DOS) attack.
For instance, between October 24 and November 4, the method was used to send over 430,000 emails to two groups. 2.1 million emails were sent to the targeted groups in the 13 days leading up to September 30.
Experts have told The Asahi Shimbun that this may be an attempt to trigger an internal conflict among anti-nuclear organizations.
As far as the attackers are concerned, IT security firms haven’t been able to track them down because they’ve utilized the TOR network to hide their tracks.
The tools used for this attack are said to have been developed especially for this operation.
Representatives of the anti-nuclear citizens groups said they might file a criminal complaint against the attackers for disrupting business operations. However, they can only do that if the cybercriminals are identified.
Japanese police have had some issues identifying cybercriminals over the past period. Back in February, law enforcement authorities said they were determined to enhance their anti-cybercrime capabilities by assigning more officers to cybercrime investigations.