BEIJING (AFP) - Extreme right-wing Chinese computer hackers have declared all-out war on Japanese websites, vowing to keep up their cyber assault until Japan faces up to wartime atrocities committed in China.
The self-styled Chinese Extreme Right-Wing Anti-Japanese Alliance, in a message on their website www.bsptt.gx.cn/public/badboy/hack/, claimed attacks on around 30 Japanese sites between January 24 and February 13.
Launching a new "anti-Japanese war," the group said it had targeted websites belonging to ministries, the prime minister, parliament and the state planning agency. It also claimed raids on the websites of the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper, the NHK television station, the central post office in Okinawa, a home for the elderly in Kyoto and the electronics group JVC.
Japan said last month government websites had been plastered with anti-Japanese graffiti. On Monday, officials in Tokyo said they would tighten Internet security to repel hackers.
The hacker website is a sub-domain of a government telecom website in the southern province of Guangxi, and officials said that police had no intention of clamping down on the site because it was patriotic. Chen Zhengchao, an official at the Baise Telecommunications Bureau, said local authorities would take no action against the site. "The police in charge of the security of the Internet know all about this. The content of the site is patriotic and as long as it does not publish pornography or reactionary material, we have no reason to intervene."
The website said the movement was founded by "information technology enthusiasts imbued with a strong sense of patriotism." It called on hackers to download "Internet atomic bomb China boy" software, similar to the software used in attacks on U.S. search engine Yahoo! and website CNN.com, and launch anti-Japanese hacking attacks.
"We welcome more anti-Japanese sites to join the attack and explode an atom bomb on the Japanese Internet," said the group. "The main principle of the alliance is to make continued cyberspace attacks on a small number of Japanese mad dogs. The main attack goals will be the websites of the puny Japanese government and companies."
The claim of responsibility came after Japanese officials last month said hackers broke into a government Internet site and left a message blasting Tokyo's failure to recognize its wartime past. Messages in several languages were discovered at the site of the Management and Coordination Agency, which gathers official economic data.
In broken English, one message read: "Japanese, as all people know, is a folk which has no courage face to the truth of history. It's the disgrace of Asia." Several days later the hackers launched new attacks, mocking government security controls.
The attacks followed a nationalist conference in the western city of Osaka, which denied the 1937 Nanjing massacre by Japanese troops in China ever took place. The conference infuriated the Chinese government, which repeatedly admonished Tokyo for allowing the forum to take place.
Japanese Science and Technology Agency official Yuichi Sakamoto said Monday that while Japan was aware of reports about the Chinese group, it did not know who was responsible for the hacking attacks. "What is imperative for us with regard to security is to do away with security holes to fight further attacks and that is what we are doing," he said
