Highly confidential documents related to sensitive trade negotiations
are suspected to have been stolen from computers at Japanese farm ministry,
government sources said.
The sources said a cyber-attack
originating overseas is thought to have obtained more than 3,000 pieces of
information, including about 20 top-secret documents on the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) free trade pact negotiations.
Government investigators found
evidence indicating that official computers of the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries
Ministry had been remote-controlled by and communicated with a computer server
abroad.
Investigators believe the attack
targeted documents made just prior to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
(APEC) summit meeting in November 2011 and before a Japan-US summit meeting in
April 2012. The attacker highly likely obtained diplomatic policy information,
the sources said.
According to the sources, the
suspected stolen material concerned internal ministry documents created from
October 2011 to April 2012.
One document created before the
April 2012 meeting between then Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda and US President
Barack Obama contained a draft statement on the TPP drawn up in conjunction
with the Foreign Ministry that was to be incorporated into a joint statement
issued by the two leaders.
The document also contained a
summary of remarks Noda was to make during the summit meeting, as well as his
schedule in the United States.
Another document, made just
before an APEC summit in November 2011 when it was suspected the government
would announce it would join the TPP talks, described Noda's intentions on when
to join the negotiations.
More than 20 of the documents
thought to have been stolen are considered highly confidential, the sources
said, and included a road map outlining Japan's potential participation in the
TPP talks and an analysis of the impact of postponing a decision.
The documents in question fell
under the second of the government's three levels of confidentiality, meaning
that a leak could infringe on the people's rights or hinder administrative
work.
The documents are believed to
have been moved from a personal computer issued to an official in charge of the
TPP and other international negotiations to another computer, where the data
was compressed to make transmission easier.
This computer then allegedly
communicated with a server with an Internet protocol address in South Korea.
The agriculture ministry's
investigation found that the attacker apparently manipulated this South Korean
server. The operations screen was displayed in the Korean Hangul alphabet.
About a year ago, the ministry
was warned by the National Information Security Centre (NISC) that a suspicious
transmission had been made.
The NISC is part of the Cabinet
Secretariat, and is tasked with the creation of basic strategies and general
coordination for state information security. It was established in April 2005
by the prime minister, and has an undisclosed number of staff.
The NISC's activities cover not
only government ministries and agencies, but also key infrastructure such as
telecommunications, financial services and trains.
After receiving the warning, the
ministry launched an investigation, discovering around spring 2012 that a
document created in October 2011 was likely transmitted outside the ministry.
The ministry isolated the
computer that had been infected with a virus, but later found that other
ministry computers had also been infected.
It is not yet known when the
computer began to be remotely controlled, but the ministry said it had stopped.
A ministry official declined to
comment on the issue, saying that admitting a virus infection had occurred
would expose the weaknesses of the ministry's computer system. However, the
official did not deny material had been stolen.
The Yomiuri Shimbun
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