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Sep 24, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Masaharu Ban |Manami Ogawa |Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- Fake Facebook accounts posing as leading Japanese brokerages ran roughly 10,000 ads to scam users between August 2023 and May 2024, Nikkei has found, as the nation grapples with the spread of investment fraud. Investment scams on social media began to surge around the summer of 2023. Fake ads, including ones using the names and logos of real companies, are one way to draw victims in.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- The reported link between a Japanese manufacturer and the walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah fighters that exploded this week in Lebanon underscores the difficulty companies face in keeping their products from being used for military or terrorist activities. The devices were labeled with the logo of Icom, which said Thursday that "it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company."
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- Dozens of Japanese companies including Toyota Motor and Hitachi are collaborating in an industrywide initiative to improve cybersecurity for automobiles. The 116 companies, which are members of the Japan Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center, look to formulate industry-wide rules concerning software bills of materials (SBOMs), or inventories listing the components in automotive software.
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Jul 19, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- A leading website for illegally downloading Japanese music, mainly from anime shows, has gone offline after legal action by the music industry. Created around 2014, Hikari No Akari also had such categories as movies, TV dramas and video games.
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Jun 2, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- Japanese electronics group Sharp and telecom partner KDDI will convert a factory site in Japan into a data center for artificial intelligence powered by advanced Nvidia chips, Nikkei has learned. Sharp and KDDI agreed Sunday to begin talks on establishing a data center joint venture with other partners including Japanese systems developer Datasection. The size of the investment and the ownership breakdown have yet to be decided.
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May 27, 2024 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- An increasing number of companies and other organizations are coming to rely on ethical hackers both at home and abroad as cross-border cybersecurity matchmaking services proliferate. The outsourcing of jobs to programmers in emerging countries by companies and government agencies in developed countries is making possible a new way of making a living -- call them "digital migrant workers."
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Nov 4, 2023 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- China's presence is growing in cybersecurity technology, with companies such as Huawei and Tencent accounting for six of the top 10 global patent holdings in the sector as of August. Chinese companies have made headway in technological fields that affect economic security, according to industry insiders, as they focus on fostering their own tech amid the growing standoff between the U.S. and China.
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Oct 26, 2023 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- The Israel-Hamas war has led to a widening conflict in cyberspace being waged by dozens of hacker groups in a phenomenon with global ramifications for critical infrastructure. Since Hamas' Oct. 7 assault on Israel, groups of "hacktivists" have been launching cyberattacks against Israel. They include Russia-aligned groups Killnet and Anonymous Sudan, which had previously targeted Ukraine and nations supporting it.
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Jul 19, 2023 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Masaharu Ban |Akinobu Iwasawa
TOKYO -- India accounted for more than a quarter of all downloads of Threads, Meta's new social media platform, in the days after its launch this month, pointing to a user base more tilted toward emerging economies than that of its rival Twitter. Threads racked up more than 100 million users between its release on July 6 Japan time and July 11.
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May 15, 2023 | 
asia.nikkei.com | Akinobu Iwasawa |Rei Kobayashi
TOKYO -- North Korea is using cyberattacks to target Japanese cryptocurrency assets. Hacker groups affiliated with North Korea have stolen $721 million from Japan since 2017, according to a study by a U.K.-based compliance specialist. That is equal to 30% of the total of such losses worldwide. Pyongyang is believed to have targeted the crypto assets of other countries to obtain the foreign currency that it uses for its missile program. This could, in turn, threaten the security of Asia.
