Japan's political parties vow to ramp up cybersecurity policies as threats rise

Produce more floppy disk, can't hack them if they're online, and employ Alsok to deliver floppy disks between branches of offices.

Lure the hackers into attractive and sophisticated secured sites that keeps them busy but holds only irrelevant data. Keep the real data hidden at intranets which have already technically no possible internet access or at least are extremely disconnected from it. But still the used hardware could be infected, like the infamous spying Chinese cheap office coffee machine or the Lebanon pagers and walkie-talkies. That's why for the most important valued data, of course use only analog methods, 'pen and paper' so to say, of course please not exactly pen and paper...

Sneaky way of desecrating the flag of Japan.

This lack of respect and its feigned innocence should not be dismissed.

Re: Floppy disks.

Amusing but the shift to digital has been a bit nuts. There is a lot of stuff out there that it is better and safer to do manually, on paper. If there is no net benefit to doing something digitally, don't. That is particularly relevant for public services that need constant, expensive upgrades to software, hardware and service subscriptions - money that might be better spent on the services themselves. If something works fine and cheaply without using tech, don't migrate it merely for the sake of it. Data on paper cannot be hacked from Russia.

And governments should stop lobbying for encryption bans and back doors just so they can spy on their citizens. Reducing your own security just makes it easier for others to hack your stuff. US telcos have been hacked using the backdoors demanded by the USG to wiretap US citizens. Learn from that and don't repeat it.

Malware is less of a threat if a few simple rules are observed, but organisations fail to encrypt data, demand too much of it, avoid distributed systems, and allow infrastructure and internal servers to be accessed from the public internet. It's basic stuff - start there.

As for a cyber arms race, it is a bad idea to start a war you might not win. The North Koreans seem to be surprisingly good at it, given the state of consumer level tech there.

One escalation of merit would be to treat malware attacks on public services as terrorist attacks and respond at the appropriate level. Going after malware gangs as the Americans went after bin Laden, with the same intentions, weaponry and result, would be a better plan than tit-for-tat attacks on someone else's public services. Cyber MAD will just wreck the net for everyone.

All I can say is that Hackers, Scammers, and Thieves are laughing all the way to the banks while the LDP still considering the next steps.

One of the focal points is whether the next government will try to pass a bill to introduce "active cyber defense," a concept in which when signs of cyberattacks are detected, preemptive steps such as disrupting enemy servers with computer viruses are executed if necessary.

Lol, there is not even a proper culture of cyber safety and security in the country, One person I know working on the IT department of a national institute told me that in this year cybersecurity test (a fake fishing e-mail send to the people working there) close to 10% of the recipients failed to recognize it as suspicious and clicked a link that would have had their computers infected. The worst part is that apparently this was better than previous years.