Security News
According to Mandiant, who has tracked APT43 since 2018, the threat actor aligns with the mission of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, the main foreign intelligence service from North Korea. In particular, malware and tools have been shared between APT43 and the infamous Lazarus threat actor.
A Monday post from FTX Japan states the outfit plans to allow withdrawals from an unspecified moment in February, through the Liquid web site. In 2022 Japan again passed crypto-related laws as it sought to deal with stablecoins and the rise of NFTs. The result of all that lawmaking is that crypto exchanges in Japan are required to register with the Financial Services Agency, demonstrate they can comply with anti-money-laundering laws and similar regulations, set aside capital reserves, and separate customer and exchange assets.
Japan is also revising its cyber security strategy according to Nikkei. Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency announced last week it has started conceptualizing a satellite refueling service with private Japanese orbital debris removal company, Astroscale.
The United Kingdom, Japan and Italy will pool resources to build a sixth-generation warplane scheduled to be ready for deployment by 2035, with capabilities understood to include AI to rival never-before-seen tech on fighter jets built by China and Russia, although this wasn't stated explicitly. The "Sharing the costs" bit will be important to the UK, which hasn't built a fighter jet alone for quite some time.
Japan's Ministry of Defence announced on Friday that it has formally joined NATO's Cooperative Cyber Defense Centre of Excellence. The CCDCOE is recognized as an international military organization and cyber defence hub focusing on research, training and exercises, like its yearly red team versus blue team cyber war game, Locked Shields.
Beginning in Autumn 2024, existing photo-less national health insurance cards will no longer be accepted, officially replaced by My Number Cards. There's only one problem: Japan residents seem reluctant to adopt them, with an online petition to keep current health cards quickly gathering 100,000 signatures.
Yahoo Japan has revealed that it plans to go passwordless, and that 30 million of its 50 million monthly active users have already stopped using passwords in favor of a combination of FIDO and TXT messages. A case study penned by staff from Yahoo Japan and Google's developer team, explains that the company started work on passwordless initiatives in 2015 but now plans to go all-in because half of its users employ the same password on six or more sites.
Toyota doesn't know how long the 14 plants will be unplugged. Reuters reported that within hours of Japan having joined Western allies in blocking some Russian banks from accessing the SWIFT international payment system and committing to giving Ukraine $100 million in emergency aid, a spokesperson at Toyota supplier Kojima Industries Corp. said that it had apparently been hit by "Some kind of cyber attack."
A man found guilty of using the Coinhive cryptojacking script to mine Monero on users' PCs while they browsed the web has been cleared by Japan's Supreme Court on the grounds that crypto mining software is not malware. Tokyo High Court ruled against the defendant, 34-year-old Seiya Moroi, on charges of keeping electromagnetic records of an unjust program.
Social media and search engine operators in Japan will be required to specify the countries in which users' data is physically stored, under a planned tweak to local laws. The amendment, if passed, requires search engines, social media operators and mobile phone companies with over 10 million Japanese users to disclose where in the world they store data, and identify any foreign subcontractors that can access the data.