Japanese Government Urgently Allocates 10 Billion Yen to Strengthen Cybersecurity

TechFlow reported on Nov. 6 that, according to Yonhap News Agency, the Japanese government decided at a cabinet meeting on Nov. 6 to draw on the current fiscal year's budget reserve and urgently allocate 10 billion yen (about 85 billion won) to strengthen cybersecurity response. Of the total, 4.1 billion yen will be used to strengthen the 'mobile cyber defense' system, which allows police to access attack servers and eliminate risk factors; 3.8 billion yen will be used to strengthen the Digital Agency's system security; and 2 billion yen will be used to leverage artificial intelligence to inspect vulnerabilities in government and other systems.

Japan's Digital Minister Takashi Matsumoto said there have been cases in which AI discovered previously unknown vulnerabilities in PHP and other technologies, emphasizing that it is important to use high-performance AI to inspect systems and respond promptly before vulnerabilities are exploited. Japan has seen frequent hacking incidents this year. The Personal Information Protection Commission said that since April, leaked personal information has amounted to about 260 million records, including duplicates. In July, the government intranet 'Government Solution Service' was illegally accessed, exposing the personal information of more than 246,000 civil servants. In September, 6.6 million personal records of users of Times Car, Japan's largest car-sharing company, were leaked by hackers, and the corporate cloud service system of SoftBank subsidiary IDC Frontier was hit by a ransomware attack. Last month, IT giant GMO Internet Group said hackers demanded a USD 1 million ransom.

Source: TechFlow