Chinese hackers are the alleged attackers in Japan’s NISC

Japan’s National Center of Incident Readiness and Strategy for Cybersecurity (NISC) confirmed that the personal data connected to its email exchanges was compromised after a cyberattack in October last year.

Reports claimed that a Chinese threat group was the culprit for breaching the Japanese cybersecurity agency, resulting in the access of sensitive information stored on its networks for nine months before its discovery.

The affected entity has yet to attribute the incident to any cybercriminal groups. A news outlet cited three government and private sector sources investigating the situation. It claimed that a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor was the attack’s alleged mastermind.

The report follows recent news from a US-based news outlet claiming that the United States National Agency uncovered an incident where Chinese military hackers had compromised the Japanese defence networks a couple of years ago.

The news report claimed that the cyberattack against Japan’s defence networks endangered the impeding intelligence-sharing between the Pentagon and the Japanese defence forces. Hence, the cyberattack could cause concerns to many countries since Japan and other Asian Pacific countries have strengthened their ties with the United States.

 

China has also attacked another Japanese entity aside from NISC this year.

 

Reports stated that the NISC is not the only victim that the Chinese hackers have infected in Japan since a separate incident disrupted the port of Nagoya this year. Initial research revealed that the LockBit ransomware group are the hacker behind the campaign, but a newspaper report that experts consider the attack to be part of a persistent testing of the Japanese infrastructural defences executed by China.

The Japanese government has yet to reveal further details about the cyberattack. However, the NISC denied the severity of the attack, which the hackers claimed they achieved. This detail implies that the actors have only accessed the email system of the agency, nothing more.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that their country was the attack’s culprit and blamed the US. Lastly, China has pledged to reveal the United States’ espionage activities after blaming them for their hacking activities.