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Not to be left behind on the modern field of cyber warfare, Japan is planning to develop its first-ever defensive computer virus to help ward off cyber attacks.
The Kyodo News revealed that Japan will develop its first-ever computer virus as a defense measure against cyber attacks and that the development will be completed by next March.
The Defense Ministry plans to use the malware as a vaccine that could neutralize the other malicious codes.
The Japanese Government aims at improving its defense capabilities in the fifth domain of warfare and wants to be ready to face threats from the cyberspace.
The island nation is well aware it must invest heavily to attempt closing the extensive gap between its own cyber capabilities and those of the major players in the field.
"Japan lags behind other countries in addressing the threat of cyberattacks. It plans to increase the number of personnel in its cyberspace unit to 220 from 150, compared with 6,200 in the United States, 7,000 in North Korea and 130,000 in China, according to the ministry."
In Japan, anytime any capability is considered which could theoretically be used for offense as well as defense, there is controversy stemming from Article 9 of the country's pacifist constitution, which was adopted on May 3, 1947 (after World War II)
"Some defense experts say the ability to obstruct an enemy's use of cyberspace could exceed the limits of the country's exclusively defense-oriented policy."
Those concerned should be reassured however as the defense ministry has stated that the virus "will not be used for pre-emptive attack or active defense"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 05 2019, @11:49PM (1 child)
Although at first glance it looks crazy, the general idea is not bad: automating incident response. A defensive malware need not do much, if it manages to ping back a public clearnet IP, locale settings of the system, discovered neighboring nodes on the network and maybe grab some random files from the home folder this would be a huge step towards credible attribution of CNE attacks.
If the japanese succeed in designing a malware that infects attackers and manages to surreptitiously exfiltrate these few bits of information, I'd not only be impressed, I'd be envious. Because incident response is hard and attribution even harder.
With these high hopes, I still suspect it will be some lame version of "Black ICE/offensive firewall" [wikipedia.org] that tries to "hack back the hackers" or make an attacking machine self-destruct in a blaze of blue electrical fire and complementary burnout of any would-be hackers' neural implants. Lol.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 06 2019, @06:06PM
Actually, this idea is bad. It's one of those Hollywood ideas which sounds amazing, but if you know the technology, you realize it's terrible.
As an example, imagine you have been infected and unknowingly have Back Orifice installed on your machine. Now the attacker accesses your machine, and uses it to attack Japan.
Or even further, imagine somebody uses another machine as an intermediary proxy, and then uses an Remote Desktop to access another machine, and then uses that other machine to get to your machine, and then uses your computer to attack Japan.
How will the "defensive malware" know which machine to counter-hack? How sure are you that they will get the correct one and not hurt a hapless bystander?