Japan's industry ministry is moving forward with plans to establish a dedicated cybersecurity unit staffed with ethical hackers who will leverage artificial intelligence to probe the country's digital infrastructure for exploitable weaknesses. Industry Minister Ryosei Akazawa unveiled the initiative on Friday, with the Information-technology Promotion Agency (IPA)—a body operating under the ministry's authority—set to launch the team in November, according to Japanese business publication Business+IT. The unit will conduct simulated cyberattacks designed to uncover security gaps that organisations can subsequently remediate.
Akazawa framed the initiative as a response to escalating cyberattack activity targeting Japanese corporations, emphasising that threat actors are increasingly deploying AI to identify vulnerabilities with greater speed and efficiency. "An attack can succeed by getting through just one hole," Akazawa said. "Defenders also need to make use of AI and respond proactively, staying one step ahead," he added.
The announcement arrives amid significant operational disruptions stemming from two critical vulnerabilities discovered in PHP, the widely-deployed programming language that underpins countless web applications. On October 21, PHP developers released security patches addressing flaws that permit attackers to execute arbitrary code on servers without requiring authentication credentials.
The scale of exploitation attempts has been substantial. Cloudflare's chief executive Matthew Prince reported that efforts to leverage these vulnerabilities had reached millions of instances. SoftBank halted its emergency alert messaging service across SoftBank, Y!mobile and LINEMO networks beginning at 06:47 Japan Standard Time on Friday to address the vulnerability. The suspension means subscribers will temporarily lose access to text-based notifications for earthquakes, tsunamis and evacuation orders. The company projected completion of remediation work by October 26 and recommended users download a dedicated disaster warning application as an interim measure.
Multiple major Japanese institutions have similarly taken services offline. Financial sector players including Nomura and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, along with transportation operator East Japan Railway and airline ANA, have suspended portions of their online operations, Reuters reported. Japan's Finance Ministry, National Tax Agency and Meteorological Agency have also taken systems offline. Beyond Japan, several European government websites went dark on October 21 as well.
While Japanese authorities have not disclosed any confirmed breaches resulting from these vulnerabilities, Amazon detected an exploitation attempt targeting its honeypot servers on October 17—four days prior to patch availability, according to The Register. Trend Micro CEO Eva Chen suggested to Reuters that attackers are likely motivated by access to the comprehensive datasets maintained by Japanese organisations, and that AI technology diminishes linguistic obstacles that previously complicated targeting such entities.
Source: The Next Web
