Japan Says Chinese Hackers Targeted Its Government and Tech Companies For Years 6
The Japanese government published an alert on Wednesday accusing a Chinese hacking group of targeting and breaching dozens of government organizations, companies, and individuals in the country since 2019. From a report: Japan's National Police Agency and the National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity attributed the years-long hacking spree to a group called MirrorFace.
"The MirrorFace attack campaign is an organized cyber attack suspected to be linked to China, with the primary objective of stealing information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology," the authorities wrote in the alert, according to a machine translation. A longer version of the alert said the targets included Japan's Foreign and Defense ministries, the country's space agency, as well as politicians, journalists, private companies and tech think tanks, according to the Associated Press. In July 2024 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) wrote in a blog post that MirrorFace's "targets were initially media, political organisations, think tanks and universities, but it has shifted to manufacturers and research institutions since 2023."
"The MirrorFace attack campaign is an organized cyber attack suspected to be linked to China, with the primary objective of stealing information related to Japan's national security and advanced technology," the authorities wrote in the alert, according to a machine translation. A longer version of the alert said the targets included Japan's Foreign and Defense ministries, the country's space agency, as well as politicians, journalists, private companies and tech think tanks, according to the Associated Press. In July 2024 Japan's Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC) wrote in a blog post that MirrorFace's "targets were initially media, political organisations, think tanks and universities, but it has shifted to manufacturers and research institutions since 2023."
How to steer the crime out of their borders? (Score:2)
There have been some reports on this on NHK (and NHK-World) over the last few days. However Japan is sort of well known as a locus of "economic espionage" and I haven't really spotted anything new this time around.
What has been new (or at least a recent development) are the spam phone calls from Chinese scammers. Got another one yesterday, but still can't figure out what the scam is. The calls are making a scam pitch in Chinese, so that seems to rule out random dialing to a country where so few people speak
Re: (Score:2)
The main attack vector for state actors is still phishing. Companies are getting a little better at making workers aware, but there are still billions of corporate email addresses to exploit every day. Bigger agencies at the federal level need to be funded with countering these operations. These are state against state attacks, where countries are working to suck money and data out of their adversaries. I don't see local police having the resources to handle cybercrime. The police in my area are only really
I mean, no one does anything to China for this (Score:3)
shit. Why wouldn't they? They're a plague on the whole world.
Re: (Score:1)
Same can be said of Uncle Sam. Bush signed off on backdooring everything everywhere long before China even started. Not to mention throwing international laws, and a lot of USAs too, out the window - even declared the UN as irrelevant. It seems like a case of you reap what you sow. Misery is easy as they say.
You thought they weren't doing so? (Score:2)
Really this is just publishing the record of what they're pretty sure happened. It's not a surprising behavior by the Chinese. Nobody assumed zero action was happening online by their members.
Sad that we're still here for "cybersecurity".