Japan

The Japanese government's data protection policies have been called into question after it emerged that a decommissioned coast guard vessel was sold to a pro-North Korea organisation without any checks as to whether key data on board was first deleted.

The 106-ton Japan Coast Guard patrol boat Takachiho was taken out of service in 2011 and sold to a ship breaker run by a senior figure from the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon), according to the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Authorities in Japan are so worried about their inability to tackle cybercrime that they are asking the country's ISPs to block the use of Tor.

According to The Mainichi, the National Police Agency (NPA, a bit like the Japanese FBI) is going to urge ISPs to block customers if they are found to have "abused" Tor online. Since Tor anonymizes traffic, that can be read as a presumption of guilt on anyone who anonymizes their Web activity.

Malware researchers at Seculert say they've found two more cases of highly targeted malware coming out of China, and claim to have back-traced it to the same geographical region that was fingered as the source of the Project Aurora attacks.

"It's using a similar MO – infected PDFs sent out as part of a spear-phishing campaign," Aviv Raff, CTO of Seculert, told The Register. "We resolved it and found it was reporting to an IP address in China with the same physical location as the previous attacks. They are up to something."

A team of hackers led by a 16-year-old high school student is gaining attention as a favorite to win a nationwide computer hacking contest for students that started Saturday in Tokyo.

In the Security Contest Capture The Flag competition (SECCON CTF), 10 teams compete against each other to break into a server by discovering and exploiting its weaknesses.

Police in Tokyo recently arrested Yusuke Katayama, 30, for allegedly hijacking other people's computers to make online threats, then taunting Japanese media and police with riddles that led them to a memory card strapped to a cat's collar.

"Katayama was arrested on suspicion of forcible obstruction of business for using [a] computer virus to remotely access the computers of others and send out threats through them, including mass murder in a school and on the streets of Osaka," The Asahi Shimbun reports.

In an effort to bolster its defenses against cyber attacks, Japan held its first government-sanctioned hacking contest, which culminated February 3 in Tokyo.

According to a report on NHK, Japan's national broadcaster, Masahiro Uemura, an official with the Ministry of the Economy, Trade and Industry, said these kinds of contests are common in other countries and are used to develop a domestic pool of cyber security experts. He added that Japan has a shortage of experts and is looking for ways to foster them.

The National Police Agency said Thursday it will promote communications with ethical hackers as part of efforts to better combat cybercrime and cyber-attacks.

The agency hopes the move will enable it to collect more information on such crimes, including the use of viruses to remotely control computers. This is the agency's first organized effort to promote relations with ethical hackers, although some investigators have formed such relationships on their own.

Japanese police are looking for an individual who can code in C#, uses a "Syberian Post Office" to make anonymous posts online, and knows how to surf the web without leaving any digital tracks -- and they're willing to pay.

It is the first time that Japan's National Police Agency has offered a monetary reward for a wanted hacker, or put so much technical detail into one of its wanted postings. The NPA will pay up to AY=3 million yen (US$36,000), the maximum allowed under its reward system.

Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has reportedly suffered its second major malware incident in under a year after an attack that has resulted in the leaking of details of the country's top-secret Epsilon rocket programme.

According to unconfirmed reports, on 21 November JAXA discovered an unidentified data-stealing "virus" on a computer at the Tsukuba Space Centre used to store details of the country's prestigious solid fuel rocket programme.

An international group of hackers targeting five universities in Japan has leaked what appears to be personal information belonging to the institutions' students and professors.

The group, which calls itself GhostShell, targeted the University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, Nagoya University, Tohoku University and Osaka City University.