Tag Archive for: Japan

Japan, Philippines, US to Share Cyber Threat Intel

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The US, Japan, and the Philippines reportedly will join forces in cybersecurity defense with a strategic cyber threat-sharing arrangement in the wake of rising attacks by China, North Korea, and Russia.

The initiative will launch during high-level trilateral talks between US President Joe Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. during a trilateral summit in Washington this week, according to the English-language version of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. The cyber alliance comes on the heels of Volt Typhoon, a group of cyberattackers linked to China’s military, targeting critical infrastructure networks in the Philippines and US territories in the region.

Over the past three months, the number of cyberattack attempts against national government agencies in the Philippines has increased 20% week over week, according to data from Trend Micro shared with Dark Reading. 

“Traditional US allies in Asia — Japan, Taiwan, Philippines — are of high interest to Chinese-aligned attackers,” says Robert McArdle, director of forward-looking threat research with the cybersecurity firm. “There has been an increase in tensions in the region recently as well as important political events including presidential elections that China maintains interest in.”

The cybersecurity concerns come as geopolitical tensions have ratcheted up in the region. China has both expanded its military presence, especially with its claims to large sections of the South China Sea — as far away as 1,000 km from its mainland and encroaching on Philippines territory. The military buildup has been matched by increases in cyberattacks by Chinese state-sponsored actors, such as Mustang Panda, which compromised a Philippines government agency last year. The widespread Volt Typhoon attacks have claimed critical infrastructure networks in the Philippines, US, UK, and Australia.

Philippines at Risk

The dispute over the South China Sea comes at a time when the Philippines has seen significant growth in its technology development and business sectors and increased urbanization and Internet access, says Myla Pilao, director for technical marketing for Trend Micro, who works in the…

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US, South Korea and Japan strengthen cyber security

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Reuters Now

Posted

The United States, South Korea and Japan have agreed on new initiatives to respond to North Korea’s threats in cyberspace, satellite launches and cryptocurrency abuses, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Saturday (December 9).

Reuters Now

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Chinese Hackers Are Hiding in Routers in the US and Japan

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WIRED broke the news on Wednesday that SoundThinking, the company behind the gunshot-detection system ShotSpotter, is acquiring some assets—including patents, customers, and employees—from the firm Geolitica, which developed the notorious predictive policing software PredPol. WIRED also exclusively reported this week that the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center is calling on the US Justice Department to investigate potentially biased deployment of ShotSpotter in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

As the US federal government inches closer to a possible shutdown, we took a look at the sprawling conservative media apparatus and deep bench of right-wing hardliners in Congress that are exploiting their leverage to block a compromise in the House of Representatives.

Satellite imaging from the Conflict Observatory at Yale University is providing harrowing insight and crucial information about the devastation wrought in the city of Khartoum by Sudan’s civil war. Meanwhile, researchers from the cybersecurity firm eQualitie have developed a technique for hiding digital content in satellite TV signals—a method that could be used to circumvent censorship and internet shutdowns around the world. And the productivity data that corporations have increasingly been gathering about their employees using monitoring software could be mined in an additional way to train AI models and eventually automate entire jobs.

Plus, there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

A China-linked hacking group, dubbed BlackTech, is compromising routers in the US and Japan, secretly modifying their firmware and moving around company networks, according to a warning issued by cybersecurity officials this week. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the NSA, FBI, and Japan’s National Police Agency and cybersecurity office issued the joint alert saying the BlackTech group was “hiding in router firmware.”

The officials said they had seen the Chinese-linked actors using their access to the routers to move from “global subsidiary…

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US, Japan authorities warn of China-linked hacking group BlackTech

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By Kantaro Komiya

TOKYO (Reuters) – U.S. National Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation and Japanese police jointly warned multinational companies of China-linked hacker group BlackTech in a cybersecurity advisory late on Wednesday.

The joint advisory, which also came from the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and its Japanese counterpart, urged firms to review the internet routers at their subsidiaries to minimise the risk of potential attack from the group.

“BlackTech has demonstrated capabilities in modifying router firmware without detection and exploiting routers’ domain-trust relationships to pivot from international subsidiaries to headquarters in Japan and the United States, which are the primary targets,” the statement said.

BlackTech has been engaging in cyberattacks on governments and tech-sector companies in the United States and East Asia since around 2010, Japan’s National Police Agency said in a separate statement.

In 2020, self-ruled Taiwan’s security authority reported cyberattacks to some 6,000 government officials’ email accounts from Blacktech and another hacking group Taidoor, saying both were likely backed by the Chinese Communist Party.

Amid heightening U.S.-China tensions over issues including Taiwan, U.S. security officials are raising the tone of their warnings against China’s cyberattack capabilities. FBI chief Chris Wray earlier this month said China “has a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined”.

In May, cybersecurity authorities of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom joined the U.S. agencies in issuing an advisory on China’s “state-sponsored cyber actor”.

Japan, a key U.S. ally in East Asia along with South Korea, was allegedly attacked by Chinese military hackers that gained access to its classified defence networks in 2020, the Washington Post said last month. The Pentagon said it was confident about sharing intelligence with Japan despite the report.

(Reporting by Kantaro Komiya; Editing by Michael Perry)

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