Suspected Chinese hackers breach Japan’s cybersecurity Agency

It is reported that suspected Chinese hackers compromised Japan’s cybersecurity agency and accessed sensitive data stored on its networks for over nine months before being discovered.

Japan’s National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) recently discovered that personal data linked to email exchanges may have been compromised after they were hacked last year in October.

While NISC has not attributed this incident publicly to anyone, a report by the Financial Times claims that three government and private sector sources suspected state-backed Chinese hackers to be behind the attack. Responding to the Financial Times, NISC disputed the scale of access which the alleged hackers had managed to achieve, stressing that it was limited to the agency’s email system.

Early this month, the Washington Post had reported that the US National Security Agency had discovered that Chinese hackers backed by China had compromised Japan’s defense networks k in 2020, terming it as “one of the most damaging hacks” in Japan’s history.

Financial Times further reports that the “government cyber experts” now belive that the cybersecurity incident that hit Japan’s port of Nagoya earlier this year was a part of “persistent testing of Japan’s infrastructural defenses by China,” However, Japan’s Cabinet Office, that runs NISC has not responded on these allegations.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied the allegation and blamed the United States instead.