Japan Developing Virus Program for Defense against Cyber Attacks

The Ministry of Defense for Japan has assigned software experts to work on a PC-virus, which will trace, identify, as well as deactivate sources of Internet assaults, published DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE on January 3, 2011.

Essentially, with a plan to spread the ongoing project over a 3-yr period, the government of Japan has allotted an estimated $2.3m for it towards countering threats on the Internet. Local media reports that it's indeed a virus that'll serve as a weapon to first track and examine the assaults and then detect their origin before disabling them for averting any subsequent problem.

A highly unique ability that characterizes the newly developing program is that it can in addition to detecting the immediate origin out of which the attack emerges identify all "springboard" PCs utilized for channeling it.

Experts on IT security in Japan state that over the past months, hackers targeted different computer systems that Japanese officials used. Both the Parliament as well as local governments suffered in the process. Also, there've been attacks on computers installed at Japanese consulates and embassies within 9 nations during 2011 summer.

More recently, during November 2011, a PC that some 200 local governments in Japan operated was attacked.

Earlier during October 2011, a cyber-attack struck the Japanese Parliament that seemingly triggered from the identical electronic mails originating from a server located in China, which have already attacked many legislators' PCs.

However, there's a key problem with the virus development program i.e. according to Japanese law, creation of PC-viruses is forbidden. Still a compromise maybe attained over time, considering that the project has been initiated for the security of the entire nation.

Presently, developers of the code are performing its trial within a 'closed setting' for studying how it can be applied.

Further, sources reveal that the virus is capable of accurately detecting a cyber-attack's source, incase of a distributed denial-of-service assault and also certain assaults that steal data from infected PCs.

Conclusively, according to a few experts, it maybe necessary for Japan to modify the country's legislation prior to utilizing the program since creating virus codes for computers is banned.

Related article: Japan – Reinforce Spam Laws

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