Japanese government's computers hit by cyber attacks
A wave of cyber attacks disrupted Japanese government computer networks earlier this week, but no damage was reported, an official said Thursday. The attacks, late Sunday and early Tuesday, targeted eight ministries and agencies and caused computers to freeze up under a deluge of data, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda told a news conference. Hosoda said the barrage also made it impossible for anybody to access Web sites for the eight government bodies -- the Cabinet Office, Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, Justice Ministry, National Police Agency, Defense Agency, Coast Guard and Fair Trade Commission. He said there was no significant damage and that the networks had resumed normal operations. However, he added that it's nearly impossible to track the data. "We don't know where the attack came from, or who did it," he said. In January, several ministries suffered a similar, small-scale cyber attack, temporarily freezing Web servers but causing no permanent damage. So-called denial-of-service -- or DoS -- attacks bombard a Web server with so much data that the machine becomes unusable.
Reproduced from an article published by Security Focus
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