Japan suspects its defense ministry and national police agency Web sites have come under cyber attack this week, a news report said on Friday, amid a bitter row with China over a territorial dispute.
The government is looking into the attacks, given that China’s largest known hackers’ group had warned it would attack Japanese government Web sites until yesterday in protest over the maritime incident, Kyodo News agency reported.
The defense ministry and national police agency Web sites became difficult to access, possibly because of cyber attacks, between Wednesday and Friday, unnamed government officials were quoted as saying.
The method of attack was believed to be a so-called distributed denial of service attack, in which a group of hackers flood a target Web site with a mass of data, slowing it to a crawl, the official was quoted as saying.
The defense ministry said access to its Web site surged for about half an hour on Wednesday evening and the police agency said access to its Web site slowed considerably overnight from Thursday to early Friday.
The news report also said the government had called on municipal governments and public universities to increase surveillance of their Web sites and check their responses in case hackers launch an attack on their sites.
Japan and China are embroiled in their worst spat in years, stemming from the Sept. 7 collision of a Chinese fishing trawler and two Japanese coastguard vessels near a disputed island chain in the East China Sea.
China has so far summoned Japan’s ambassador five times over the incident, canceled a senior lawmaker’s Tokyo visit and repeatedly demanded the boat’s captain be released from Japanese custody.
It has also resumed unilateral work on a gas field in a disputed maritime territory, after scrapping talks on its joint exploitation with Japan.
Japan has called the situation “extremely regrettable.” Its officials also say there are no plans for the prime ministers of the two countries to meet next week on the sidelines of a UN summit in New York.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
RSS