Japan working on powerful cyber weapon, knows best defense is a good offense

[AdamG]

The Japanese government has been (relatively) quietly churning away on an advanced new cyber weapon. In the post Stuxnet age it's no surprise that a government would be working on powerful new tools to defend its digital borders, but this particular virus (developed with help from Fujitsu) is raising eyebrows with some over how it accomplishes its goals.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/06/j...-defense-is-a/

[Fuchs]

Defence always lags behind offence in electronic warfare.

Offence cannot serve as an effective deterrent since the root of an attack can be disguised and counterstrikes may be provoked against a third party by means of clever deception.


As much as 'national security' experts and military/intel bureaucrats with a strong sense of their own importance may hate this;

the one way out of the (still smallish) mess which looks most realistic and most promising to me is a decentralised reduction of vulnerability (decoupling networks, incompatibilities, more custom variations of source codes instead of standard source codes, no-write memories, manual supervision).

[anonamatic]

http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/T120102002799.htm

That's the URL they cite. From what I can see, well I'd describe this as a good start at best. Their tool relies on MITM access to do it's DDoS work & that's just of limited utility at best. They simply aren't going to have that type of access except over devices that are somewhat ironically Japan-only.

That aside, the disablement thing seems more like it'd be at best an edge case capability.

There's a lot of hand waving about the quasi-offensive capabilities there, but I'm gonna call BS on this until they cough up real data.

[motorfirebox]

That just seems like an incredibly bad idea. There are so many ways that could be triggered to effects significantly worse than the trigger itself.

[AdamG]

Somewhat related

February 12, 2013 — Techworld — Japanese police believe they have finally caught the man behind an extraordinary malware campaign that included taunting police in January by sending them clues on an SD card strapped to a cat.

http://www.csoonline.com/article/728...ata_protection