Japan seeking US assistance to obtain counter cyberattack capability

Tokyo – Japan is reportedly seeking to curb the increased cyberattacks on the nation’s government systems and in a bid to have the ability to counter the attacks by a foreign nation, it is mulling over plans to cooperate with the US that has the most sophisticated counterattack technology.

A source said that the ability would include being able to attack a server in self-defense if government computer systems were attacked.

According to the Japan Times, the Japanese government plans to set up a ‘cyberdefense task force’ within the Self-Defense Forces next March and the defense ministry along with other government agencies have begun compiling concrete measures to wage a counterattack.

The source said that the Japanese officials are considering waging distributed denial-of-service attacks that send huge amounts of data to offending servers.

A senior official has pointed that US cooperation is indispensable for such a task because identifying the source of cyberattack requires very sophisticated computer technology.

However, as counterattacks can also violate a Japanese law banning unauthorized access to servers and computers, the government is also planning to scrutinize the legal problems that might arise in obtaining counterattack capability, the report added.