“The defense industry is in danger!” “National secrets are targeted!” “Cyber spy?” etc. are phrases that are reported day after day in the major newspapers and on TV, so many people should have heard of them before. How should we interpret and respond to such situations?

What is important is the basic idea, “Who and for what purpose?” Let me try to put things in order my own way.

A. Crimes committed by someone who enjoys watching people’s reactions to his/her deeds
Criminals who enjoy watching other people’s reactions to what they have done or who crave the limelight have existed from the past and will probably continue to exist.

B. Market Control (Platformer)
Although they do not pose an immediate threat now, these are the people who “control or aim to control the market.” This is an area which requires appropriate care from the government, etc. as “privacy information such as information on location” is forcibly required when there is ultimately no other choice, in order to receive services.

C. Ideals and Principles
These people launch “attacks” on “restrictions and controls” from governments, big corporations, etc. based on the belief that “the Internet is free,” and through accusations of “crimes” and exposure of secrets of governments and corporations, etc. They do harm, for example, by obstructing their businesses, stealing internal information and disclosing it publicly or exposing it to external institutions, stealing personal information and revealing the lack of management responsibility of the affected organization.

D. Mercenary
Some people work for money by harming business rivals and getting paid for what they do, or obstructing some businesses and engaging in blackmail-like businesses. These people steal information from credit cards and online banking.

E. Expansion of Rights and Interests
This refers to governments or equivalent organizations which carry out spy activities in order to protect the peace or expand their countries’ rights and interests. Some activities may be seen as obstructing another country’s expansion of rights and interests or military activities.

F. Stalking
Stalkers may target not only individuals, but also corporations. This problem has the potential of becoming more apparent and serious with the spread of smartphones and the social media.

What is happening?

There is something we must not overlook. In my last opinion column,“Outcome Accountability with Information Security Needed”, I talked about the “change from electronic computing machines to cyber space.” But in the last three years, this change has spread even more, so that not only knowledge and property of the world, but also various activities such as economic, academic, and life, are taking place and being recorded in cyber space.

In the case involving a public prosecutor altering data in a floppy disk in September last year, we were made to realize that it has become a time when even public prosecutors, lawyers and judges, etc. can no longer stay away from the cyber space. At the same time, we also witnessed many reports of cases which could be considered to have been solved as a result of analyzing digital devices such as the mobile phone. Furthermore, various changes on a global scale can also be seen happening due to the widespread use of smartphones and the social media.

Let’s focus on the obviousness of C (ideals and principles) and E (expansion of rights and interests).

We can get a hint of the obviousness of C from the sumo match-fixing scandal. In this incident, police found match-fixing details from deleted mails in mobile phones during an investigation into illegal baseball gaming by sumo related personnel and reported the problem to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, which oversees the Japan Sumo Association, from a point of view of “public interest and public benefit.” While some people pointed out that this constituted an information leak by the police, the ministry admitted that there was “public interest and public benefit” in this case and subsequently counseled the relevant parties. I personally think that this “exposure” by the police is legitimate.

Furthermore, we came to know of the existence of C within government organizations from the incident of the leaked video on the collision with a Chinese trawler in the Senkaku Islands. Wikileaks and “Anonymous,” the hacker group trying to protect Wikileaks by obstructing government controls during the “Spring of Arab” are also considered to be C. The massive leak of individual information from a major gaming company discovered in April this year was not D but C, and I am also guessing that it was targeted to bring damage to the gaming company.

On the other hand, many incidents which can be inferred as E have become more obvious recently. Experts have long reported and discussed them but it is only in recent years that specific damages have clearly emerged in Japan. Please understand that it is not that they have increased in frequency recently, but that they have only started to be reported. They are what “The defense industry is in danger!” etc. which I have stated at the beginning are referring to.

The United States (U.S.) views the cyber space as the fifth battleground after land, sea, air and the outer space and has established a national strategy to guard against it. It also does not deny the possibility of attacks in cyber space (cyber battles) becoming the trigger for actual military force. As part of this, reports in Japan also question whether our defense industry and national secrets are targeted, if Japan is dragged into a cyber battle, and whether our country is safe.

Of course, I would like our defense and national secrets to be kept securely, but there are in fact a wider range of fields even from what we have actually handled so far, such as the export-competitive manufacturing industry, media, finance-related institutions, public organizations, games-related corporations, communications-related corporations, and commerce sites. The word “attack” does not even apply to the tricks used, which are ways to maintain the infrastructure to collect all kinds of information. Among them, is it not only by chance that the parts related to defense and national secrets are emphasized and brought to light, and reported as cyber spying?

When we talk about spies, we tend to think of intellectual and action-oriented activities as seen in those 007 movies, or “the spy who is too beautiful,” at one time the talk of the town. While such dangerous, time and money consuming methods may still exist, they are actually extremely ineffective in this modern day when all types of records are digitalized. Nowadays, spying can be said to be an extremely safe and logical activity which can be performed as normal duties in remote areas. In other words, the sophistication of IT may have drastically changed the nature of spy activities and their cost performance.

Let me explain in easy terms the methods we have seen used in many organizations. First, invade the company in order to hijack (operate remotely) a computer within the organization. In many cases, a mail is cleverly sent to someone who has to open the mail, called the “target.” Once a computer is hijacked, it will be used as a focal point to carry out detailed investigations on various things such as the internal system structure, management methods, organization and work structure, while stealing and reading information anytime, constructing and maintaining an “information leakage (like a pipe) structure.” Motivation to profit from the information is not felt as the system seems to be “working” as usual.

Then, what is the real threat of this kind of infrastructure maintenance, which cannot be called an “attack?”

Someone can make use of this infrastructure to wreak direct damage by destroying the system or making it perform erroneous functions but I do not think that they will. This is because the other party may get serious and he/she may also lose the infrastructure he/she tried so hard to get. Rather, isn’t it better to make use of whatever information one can get in diplomatic ties and expand the country’s rights and interests definitely? On the other hand, for Japan, it may become a situation where our diplomatic negotiations end in failure, and we not only cannot formulate concrete policies, but also decline economically, scientifically and culturally, lose our shine and be undermined, and before we know it, become a “boiled frog.” “Becoming a boiled frog” therefore, can be considered as the real threat, can’t it?

What should we do?

I am often asked, “How should we protect ourselves?” The intention of this question is, “How should I protect myself from being infected by computer viruses?” There is no 100% protection of a target against any virus. There is no countermeasure called “Don’t catch a cold.”

Rather, if our opponent’s aim is to make you into a “boiled frog,” then we have to think of measures to counter this aim. In other words, there is a need to change our way of thinking radically, and construct our own security model.

1. Rethink what needs to be protected
That may be something such as “to respect culture and dignity, and live in harmony with people around the world.”

2. Security model to be considered
We should not think that “it’s outrageous to be infected with a virus,” but rather train ourselves to be strong enough to withstand viruses. In addition, it is also important to spread this kind of understanding. Currently, being infected with a virus is seen as a deplorable affair. In other words, when one catches a cold, one has to write a written apology or be censured by the media. We should think about what is not right. Just as we can never find an ideal corporation no matter how much we try, there is also no ideal security. Instead, it is important for us to consider “what is the worst scenario?”

If we can maximize the use of our knowledge, we can think of various ways. There are many ideas under the current security measures which lack common sense. As experts, we hope to construct a security model we can call our own.

Chinese / French / Japanese