Japan Cyber Cops Cuff Evil Cat

May 25th, 2012 by Rob Henriquez

This sounds like the plot for the next James Bond movie: a cyber villain, a coded message and the police running after a computer malware. Except this took place in Japan, in real world.

Japanese news corporation received promises of big scoops and several quizzes in e-mails. The police took over and had to acknowledge that it mis-treated a few suspects in an e-mails threat case concerning different venues, a few of which are frequented by the Imperial Family.

After going to a mountain top, the cyber coppers finally captured a cat bearing a drive with a copy of (apparently) the iesys.exe virus. Dubbed the "remote control virus", it allows - as it is the case for many malwares - an attacker to seize control of a machine and use it as a proxy to send network traffic, for instance threatening e-mails, surfing illegal websites or performing DDoS attacks.

In the process, it seems the Japanese police coerced some suspects into confessing the e-mail threats. This led to an embarrassing snafu and the police presenting apologies to four different people. After the incidents and the apologies, the police agreed that it has to better its cyber crime procedures.

Link to the press releases: here and in the Register.