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The National Police Agency announced Wednesday that it will offer cash rewards to anyone who provides information leading to an arrest in the case involving personal computers infected with software that allows a hacker to control them remotely.
A reward of up to 3 million yen will be given to anyone who provides "concrete" information in the case of a hacker, in which four people have already been wrongfully arrested, NTV reported.
The Japanese reward system until now has been limited to information about murder, robbery and arson cases. The agency has now revised regulations to make the rewards applicable to cases involving Trojan-infected PCs.
The NPA was forced to apologize to the four innocent people who were arrested and accused of threatening and blackmailing corporations. The NPA now says it believes that pertinent information on the case may be outside the reach of regular investigative methods.
Officers wrongfully arrested the four in October for threatening messages that were sent through their personal computers using a Trojan horse. Their computers were located in Tokyo, Osaka and Mie prefectures, police said, causing fears that the hacker may have access to computers nationwide.
Unlike a virus, which attempts to infect other files, a Trojan horse, or Trojan, is a malicious application that appears to be a legitimate program but whose real purpose is often to grant a hacker unauthorized access to a computer.
The hacker has sent email messages to a number of companies and individuals, including a television station and a lawyer. Police say some of the emails, which claim the hacker has remote control of the recipients' personal computers, were sent while the four wrongly-arrested individuals were under police custody.
© Japan Today
8 Comments
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basroil
A trojan does not have to appear to be a legitimate program, and in fact, they almost always look sketchy as hell. Most people should be able to tell a trojan horse from a mile away.
The reward would be put to better use simply educating people on spotting the difference between a real program and a trojan horse. Easy enough that even a child can do it.
Impersonator
I am rather interested in hearing what was the crime they were actually charged with, or can police here just arrest you and hold you until they find something to charge you with?
Amidalism
These people deserve to be arrested for being stupid enough to get a trojan in the first place. I bet they were using Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP without any antivirus running while it happened. Were probably visiting some sites/downloading some things that they shouldn't have been in the first place as well.
basroil
AmidalismDec. 13, 2012 - 04:46PM JST
Believe it or not, web broswer and OS have nothing to do with infection in the case of a trojan. IE8+, Chrome, and Firefox have built in URL scanning to block known sources of trojans and exploits, but you can still download if the site is not on a blacklist. And most damning to the idiots that got it, you actually need to open the trojan to have it do anything, which means they actually knew they downloaded it, not just that it installed itself.
100% chance that is right
midnull
@ Basroil, exactly.
midnull
Shouldn't have clicked on something they weren't supposed to.
ka_chan
Seems the NPA is way behind the times and so is the Bōei-shō and Jōhōhonbu.
nath
So, these innocent people were held for 23 days, let go for a minute and held for another 23?
How many of them were forced to sign confessions?
Did any of them lose their jobs?
We want more info here.