Japan Scrambles to Shut Down Hackers

Computer hackers have raided the Web site of a Japanese government agency, the third national entity to be so targeted in a week, just a day after central authorities convened an emergency meeting to discuss beefing up computer security, newspapers said today.

The government tried to play down the security lapses, urging against widely publicizing the raids.

“What we are worried about is that if we make too much fuss about this problem, this may encourage them to repeat” such actions, government spokesman Mikio Aoki said at a news conference.

Responding to the humiliating raids that have exposed the vulnerability of official Web sites in one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries, police said they had launched an investigation.

Hackers left a message in English reading: “Nippon [Japan] is rotten animal” on the home page of the Economic Planning Agency, and inserted a direct access switch to an overseas pornographic Web site.

The computers of the mass-circulation Mainichi newspaper were also hit by hackers, but the extent of the damage was not immediately clear, media reports said.

On Wednesday, the government convened an emergency meeting to discuss beefing up computer security, said spokeswoman Setsuko Koike of Japan’s Science and Technology Agency, whose site was also targeted. The national police set up a special headquarters to investigate the embarrassing intrusions, police said.

Even as the raids prompted questions about the level of Japan’s computer security and the apparent absence of firewalls, the Defense Agency and Foreign Ministry insisted that their home pages were invulnerable because they were inaccessible to the public.

The hacking began just days after another government meeting at which officials decided to bring Japan up to U.S. standards of computer security by 2003--possibly calling on the U.S. government for assistance in doing so--and to draw up a plan to fight “cyber-terrorism” by the end of this year.

These measures would now be enacted as soon as possible, officials have said.

The security lapses, reportedly the first hacker attacks on government sites in Japan, came to light at the beginning of the week when it was revealed that the computers of the Science and Technology Agency had been penetrated twice in two days.

Key data on another site, including census information, were erased.

At least two of the messages have attacked Japan’s war record, assailing the stand by some right-wing Japanese groups that the so-called Rape of Nanking in 1937 never happened.

Chinese and some Western historians say Japanese imperial soldiers killed as many as 300,000 people during Tokyo’s 1937-38 occupation of the Chinese city of Nanking, now called Nanjing.

Another victim of the hackers was the statistics bureau at the Management and Coordination Agency, which found Tuesday that all data, including census and consumer price figures, had been erased from its site. The information was later retrieved.