Bula every one!! You will probably find it easy to assume from the context that this word means “Hello”, but can you guess what language it is? It is Fijian. Mr. Koichiro (Sparky) Komiyama and I (Kaori Umemura), as the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) experts, were given the opportunity to visit Suva, the capital city of Fiji, to support the preparation to kickoff the Pacific Islands Computer Emergency Response...
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Hello this is Sparky and let me update JPCERT's activities in Africa since my last post "CSIRT Training for Africa". Training course in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania I have been to Africa twice this past year to provide training for future CSIRT managers and engineers. My second destination in Africa was Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A six day training course took place in conjunction with Afnog-12 from May 20 to...
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In June, along with some colleagues, I attended the FIRST Conference 2011 in Vienna. FIRST Conference 2011 in Viennahttp://conference.first.org/ On the second day of the conference (June 14th), I moderated a panel session titled: SPECIAL Panel Session: The day disaster struck the northeastern part of Japan This panel session was designed to talk about what CSIRTs in Japan did in the wake of the March 11th earthquake. The panelists were...
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In May, JPCERT/CC sent our technical specialists to the Secure Coding Seminar in C/C++ held in 3 cities: Bangkok, Nakhon Pathom and Surabaya. The seminar provided the explanation of common programming errors in C/C++ that could lead to software vulnerabilities, how these errors can be exploited, and effective mitigation measures for preventing such errors. Seminar in Bangkok (Thailand)Date: May 9th-10th, 2011Venue: Siam City HotelOrganizer: ThaiCERTNumber of Participants: 30 Seminar in...
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After our last report of phishing apparently exploiting the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami here in Japan, we have another example today: This is quite a well-designed site. Notably, this one uses the logo of the Red Cross. It's registered to an individual with a European-sounding name, Japanese street address and Gmail account. This one even ups the ante by posting photos and news gathered from other sites: One...
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The tragedy in Japan has been immense, and everyone rightly wants to help as much as possible. However, be careful who you give your donations to. We've received word of a site called Japan Donation, which asks you to sign up for an account, and then, who knows: The domain was registered on Friday by an individual in the UK with a Hotmail address. Part of the email address listed...
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We can report that everyone at JPCERT/CC is fine following the terrible earthquake and tsunami that hit near Miyagi Prefecture on 11 March 2011. The situation in Tokyo, to the south of the main island of Honshu, is comparatively stable at this point. By far, the worst of the damage is to the north of Japan, and our thoughts are with everyone affected at this time. JPCERT/CC is operating at...
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Hello, this is Koichiro Sparky Komiyama. I'm the manager of the Global Coordination Division in JPCERT/CC. Our team's main missions are 1) to communicate with CSIRTs / Security groups in other countries, and 2) to help other countries / economies develop their own CSIRTs. In this post I would like to introduce readers to one aspect of our CSIRT development work. By the request by Dr Kilnam Chon, the leader...
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Some weeks ago, JPCERT/CC and various news sites in Japan observed an interesting domain apparently targeting a Japanese government site (do not visit, potentially malicious): www. e-kokusei. go. jp. netNote the ".net" at the end. So, what is the presumed target, e-kokusei.go.jp? It's the site of the first national census conducted electronically in Japan. As well as a traditional paper form, each census information package also contained a sealed, unique...
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For anyone doing incident response in the mid-2000s, you'd no doubt be familiar with the massive upswing in phishing attacks around then. Working in the AusCERT incident response team at the time, we were swamped with scams chiefly targeting Australian banks and financial institutions. Handling a large volume of phishing attacks quickly became a part of our daily routine, and they continue to be part of the landscape. In early...
