14 DAY TRIAL // The Japanese government is being bombarded with malware, many of its ministries discovering a large number of internet threats on their machines. The last victim is the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry that found 22 devices infected with a Trojan on Friday.
According to The Daily Yomiuri, about ten divisions, including the head office and the local branch offices were among the victims, the malicious software being the same as in the other recently discovered incidents.
It seems as they were warned on a potential attack since September, but they failed to thoroughly investigate the matter until the end of October when it was already too late.
As in many of these infection campaigns, a large part of the operation succeeded because some of the ministry's employees fell victim to social engineering attempts launched by the cybercriminals.
It turns out that in this case the earthquake that hit Japan not long ago was the subject that made staff members open the email entitled "Documents released by the [government's] emergency disaster relief headquarters."
The file attached to the messages unleashed the infection and now investigators are trying to determine if the sender's name is legitimate and whether the attachment's content is the same as the legitimate document sent after the natural disaster occurred.
First results of the inquiry revealed that the manipulation software allowed for the computers to be accessed from servers located in the United States, India and Taiwan. Since one of the machines was accessed approximately 150 times, it is very likely that some information may have been stolen.
It's not enough that mother nature was unforgiving with the Japanese, now it turns out that hackers are constantly attacking their virtual assets. Hopefully, after countless of these hits, they will manage to properly secure their infrastructure to prevent further attacks, otherwise their virtual world might be crushed just like their physical environment.