14 DAY TRIAL // The computers of Japanese diplomatic offices from nine countries have been discovered to be infected with backdoor viruses which were set in place to steal information.
According to CIO Today, the Foreign Ministry launched an investigation to precisely determine the number of infected machines and the amount of data stolen, but so far at least a dozen machines were plagued.
The identified backdoor virus would allow a remote attacker to take over control of the device and access sensitive information.
It all started this summer when the Japanese Embassy in Seul noticed that some of their computers and portable devices contained a backdoor malware which made sure internal information was sent to outside locations.
Since then the offices from Canada, China, France, Myanmar, the Netherlands, South Korea and the United States were found as being affected, but it may later turn out that the number of victims is even higher.
Luckily, the Foreign Ministry stores classified data in a closed network and the infection affected only their open system. The latter is also highly secure as they expect such hits, but it seems as not enough.
"The Foreign Ministry handles confidential information in a closed local area network," Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura said. "Therefore, no confidential information has been leaked.
This is not the first time they've witnessed such operations as it turns out that the ministry was targeted by many attacks between May and June.
"However, we responded appropriately every time we found a virus infection," another official added. "As the Foreign Ministry is a likely target of cyber-attacks, we have been cautious about security for our systems, particularly since the revelation of the MHI case."
Starting with the hit on Mitsubishi and continuing with the operations that went after the information stored on the computers in parliament, the Japanese seem to have become a precious target for hackers. It will remain to be seen how much data they lost in each situation as at first sight they claimed that in most of these cases they were well protected.