### Section 4. Measures against Cyber Terrorism

Information technology has become widespread in the lives of citizens and in social and economic activities in general. When cyber attacks are carried out against the core system of such essential infrastructure $ ^{1} $ which forms the base of our society, the effect will be enormous. In order to foresee the threat of cyber terrorism at the earliest stage possible and prevent damage from occurring or spreading, the police are engaged continuously in measures against cyber terrorism $ ^{2} $ .

## (1) Situation of Measures against Cyber Terrorism

The NPA is promoting measures against cyber terrorism through the Cyber Terrorism Countermeasure Promotion Office, which is a cross-divisional section related to security, community safety and info-communication.

In addition, the Cyber Force Center is established within the NPA as a technical core for measures against cyber terrorism. It operates a real time, detection network system $ ^{3} $ 24 hours to recognize the trends of computers infected by bots $ ^{4} $ and other cyber terrorism plots, and thus attends to the recognition of cyber terrorism incidents. Moreover, this center functions as a technical support base for emergency correspondence when cyber terrorists occur, and assumes responsibility for providing assistance to Prefectural Police through Cyber Forces established in regional police bureaus and others.

A cross-divisional Anti-Cyber Terrorism Project is also established in Prefectural Police offices. It promotes various measures through cooperation between the public and private sectors by receiving technical support of Cyber Forces.

## (2) Approaches Related to Measures against Cyber Terrorism

## 1 ) Strengthening the Cooperation with Essential Infrastructure Providers

The Anti-Cyber Terrorism Project makes individual visits to each essential infrastructure provider in order to ask cooperation for investigation. At the same time, it organizes seminars on cyber terrorism countermeasures and Cyber Terrorism Countermeasure Councils to provide information and exchange opinions on information security. Besides this, joint training simulating such incidences is conducted with essential infrastructure providers, and thus striving to strengthen cooperation between private and public sectors.

## 2 ) Provision of Information to Internet Users

The NPA has started a security portal site “@police” (http://www.cyberpolice.go.jp/). The site discloses the latest information regarding new computer viruses and the vulnerability of various programs; in addition, the “Internet periodic observation” discloses data surrounding the state of cyber attack occurrence, which is automatically collected and analyzed in regular time intervals.

Note 1: Social infrastructure in the field of information communication, finance, aviation, railroad, electricity, gas, government/administration service, (including local public entities), healthcare, water, and transportation.

2: Attacks in cyberspace to core systems of essential infrastructure, or severe failure in the core systems which is considered to be caused by attacks in cyberspace.

3: Programs which operate based on orders by the attacker.

4: A system to summarize and analyze information from sensors which are established in internet connection points owned by police (57 locations in Japan). They observe the spread of computer virus infections.