Japan Pump W￦85.0 Billion in Emergency Funds to Block Cyberattacks

As cyberattack damage continues to mount in Japan, the Japanese government has decided to inject 10 billion yen (approx. 85 billion won) in emergency funds to step up its response, public broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News reported on November 6.

The Japanese government decided during a cabinet meeting to use reserve funds from this year's budget as a countermeasure against information leaks caused by cyberattacks.

It plans to allocate 4.1 billion yen (approx. 34.9 billion won) to strengthen an active cyber defense system where police access attacking servers to remove risk factors, 3.8 billion yen (approx. 32.3 billion won) to reinforce the Digital Agency's system security, and 2 billion yen (approx. 17 billion won) to use artificial intelligence (AI) for checking system vulnerabilities in government and other sectors.

NHK explained that the government plans to swiftly utilize reserve funds to prevent the spread of damage from cyberattacks.

Digital Minister Matsumoto Hisashi told reporters, "There are cases where AI discovers vulnerabilities that have gone undetected until now, such as in the programming language PHP." He emphasized, "It is important to use high-performance AI to check systems before security vulnerabilities become targets of cyberattacks, and to maintain a system that allows prompt responses when vulnerabilities are found."

In Japan, hacking incidents have occurred incessantly since the beginning of this year.

The Personal Information Protection Commission recently stated that personal information leaked since April amounts to approximately 260 million people, including duplicates.

In July, the government's internal network, the Government Solution Service, suffered unauthorized access, resulting in the leakage of personal information for about 246,000 public officials, while a large-scale failure occurred in the computer system of Osaka Public University.

In September, personal information for 6.6 million users of Japan's largest car-sharing company, Times Car, was leaked through hacking, and the corporate cloud service system of IDC Frontier, a subsidiary of SoftBank, was hit by a ransomware attack, causing massive damage to companies and local governments.

Last month, IT giant GMO Internet Group was demanded 1 million dollars (approx. 1.33 billion won) in ransom by hackers claiming to have broken into 27,000 servers and personal PCs to steal user information.
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.