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.
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