Japanese Parliament Comes Under another Cyber Attack

According to Yahoo! News report, the upper chamber of the Japanese parliament has come under cyber attack again, apparently from the same China-based server that struck the lower house about a week ago. It resulted in losses of passwords and other sensitive data, according to government officials. Reports indicate that several malware infected emails were circulating on government computers.

Malicious emails were found on computers used in the upper chamber of the Japanese parliament, a government spokesman said.

The report quoted deputy chief cabinet secretary Isao Saito as saying, "The upper house office has confirmed that seven suspicious emails, the same ones that were sent to the lower house, were found in computers in the upper house.”

Although reports last week stated that the computers in the lower chamber had been hit by a virus with passwords and other information possibly compromised, Saito said that the email server of the upper house had not succumbed to any virus and security had been tightened on all machines used by lawmakers there.

In fact, as per the report, local news media last month reported that politicians' computers and a lower house server had contracted a "Trojan horse" virus containing a program that allowed a China-based server to steal passwords and other information. Although it was not clear who was behind the attack, the reports indicate that it the China-based server may have been controlled from a third country.

In June, Internet giant Google said a cyber-spying campaign originating in China had targeted the Gmail accounts of senior US officials, military personnel, journalists and Chinese political activists.

However, wrote Yahoo! News, China vehemently denies that it is orchestrating any online attacks on foreign government agencies and companies.

Meanwhile, Japan is also probing a series of recent attacks on computer systems at defense contractor Mitsubishi Heavy, which reportedly could have resulted in the theft of information on military aircraft and nuclear power plants, wrote Yahoo! News.