The Japan Times Online

The Japan Times Online: "THE ZEIT GIST

Cyber war grips Asia
Internet users mirror diplomatic strife across the region

By TONY McNICOL

If comments on bulletin boards were bullets and hacking attacks real skirmishes then East Asia would probably be a war zone now.
Mirroring offline diplomatic clashes, Internet users in Japan, China and Korea have been posting verbal assaults and hackers launching determined cyber-attacks.
Internet technology has also been at the core of recent frictions over textbook and territorial disputes.
In China, mobile phones and the Internet were used to organize protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses. In Korea, citizens debated the row through blogs and bulletin-boards. In Japan, irate netizens reacted with sometimes jingoistic attacks on their country's neighbors.
As tensions peaked this Spring, numerous sites in Japan were targeted by hackers -- presumed to be based in China and Korea. Government ministries, universities, local authorities and the national police agency Web site were affected.
Yasukuni Shrine posted a notice on its Web site reporting that as many as 15,000 DOS (denial of service) attacks a second had been launched against its home page. The shrine described them as 'a base act . . . terrorism that is a fundamental negation of Internet law and order.'
Despite some reports of counter-attacks by Japanese hackers, it seems that Japan generally came off the worse in the cyber skirmishes.
Until recently Japan's digital security has been weak, says Naoki Miyagi of the National Information Security Center, a 26 strong department set up this April.
'Government Web sites were vulnerable, not properly managed. (But) recently we've been taking aggressive measures.'
The Chinese government was also caug"