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The story
After a GMO Internet group service suffered an unauthorized intrusion and an extortion site appeared publishing data purportedly belonging to customers, the Asahi Shimbun reports that Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) asked telecom carriers, through an industry body, to block access to the site. On 5ch, posters argued this just amounts to a game of whack-a-mole — shut the site down and it simply pops up somewhere else — and questioned the point of blocking when the site stays viewable from outside Japan even once it’s hidden domestically. Others pushed back, citing a case where action by a foreign ISP actually did make the site unreachable, arguing the blocks do apply some pressure after all. Opinions were split on what the blocking is really meant to achieve.
Oct 29 (Thu), 5:00 AM JST
Asahi Shimbun
It has emerged that Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications asked telecom carriers, via an industry association, to block a site that published personal information purportedly belonging to customers, after a GMO Internet group service suffered unauthorized access.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Seems fair enough to go after general public access, since that's the whole point of publishing the data in the first place.
When a US provider blocked it, the site actually did become unreachable. So these guys aren't that sophisticated.
Exactly, that's the risk. I think it could backfire too.
♪ "Nothing to worry about~" (quoting a well-known kids' show jingle)
Throw 150 million yen at it and some overseas hacker will go catch your "weasel" for you. These guys aren't some mythical cryptid that doesn't actually exist.
It's because if nothing's done, the damage spreads exponentially. Of course a permanent fix gets worked out separately — this is just a stalling tactic for now.
Even GMO itself can't identify the attacker — how's some random person supposed to? There's no idle hacker just sitting around waiting to do this.
"You guys" means the people posting in this very thread.
On what basis would the hacker actually get caught? Lay out the logic.
That's not even a response to what I said.
I'm asking you to spell out the logic for why the hacker would get caught. Are you just speaking wishful thinking into the void?
This level of not getting it… might actually be an AI posting ( ﾟдﾟ)ﾊｯ
Isn't it a domain suspension? That would make it unreachable worldwide, not just blocked in Japan.
Then don't reply to me. Oh, and don't reply to this one either.
Sure thing — give me a shout again whenever you actually feel like discussing Re: #101's point.
Actually, that whole "GMO employs over 200 white-hat hackers and has world-class security technology" claim is starting to feel like false advertising worth reporting to the Consumer Affairs Agency.
That's not really white-hat hacker work, no. But still, having sites taken down one after another is a hassle for the attackers too. If they have to keep standing up that many sites in a cat-and-mouse chase, they're naturally going to leave more footprints behind.
Call it mere harassment if you want, but if your own side's hackers are quietly tracking the attacker's footprints, having the site yanked mid-surveillance is a genuinely annoying wrench in the works.
About that PHP issue — my older brother was in tears about having to pull an all-nighter fixing it. I texted him back "lol serves you right."
GMO's case is on a different level from the others, though — apparently the vulnerability was already known and had been flagged beforehand.
I got out of that line of work a long time ago so it's not my problem anymore, but there have got to be plenty of people out there who want to just die right now. I mean, back in 2000 some well-known trust banks had already been breached, and they hadn't even noticed it was happening. If things were already that bad back then, you can pretty much guess where we stand now.
Personally, the fact that this is only becoming a big deal now feels "way too late" to me. It's just that discovery lagged way behind. My guess is that by around 2024–2025, something like 80% of listed companies have already been hit.
If you want to call it pointless, sure, it's close to pointless, but it does dial back the psychological pressure of "pay up or else" at least a little. Also, if the attackers try to set up on another site while a monitoring team of hackers is watching and trying to trace their identity, forcing them to leave more footprints raises the risk of them getting traced back — in that case it does start to mean something, if a monitoring team is actually working in tandem. Though who knows if such a team is actually deployed.
If you fed a dedicated AI the command "burn down the rotten hackers' and tokuryu's (ad-hoc, social-media-recruited crime ring) base," wouldn't it just attack nonstop 24/7 and wipe them out? The other side's working by hand, so it'd be a cakewalk lol
>If you want to call it pointless, sure, it's close to pointless, but it does dial back the psychological pressure of "pay up or else" at least a little.
There's no guarantee the data won't leak even if you pay, to begin with, so it doesn't apply any real pressure — paying isn't even really an option.
With file encryption, at least paying up might actually unlock things and that's that, but these criminals aren't exactly bright either.
Background and Key Issues
Site blocking has precedent in areas like child pornography countermeasures, but the Ministry’s request itself carries no legal force — it operates on telecom carriers voluntarily complying. Because the block only works on domestic connection routes and does nothing to stop the site reappearing via overseas mirrors or a different domain, the structural limitation posters flagged as “whack-a-mole” is hard to avoid under the current system. That said, temporarily cutting off access to the extortion site is seen as aiming to slow the spread of information and raise psychological pressure on the perpetrators. At the time of this report, details such as the scale of the leaked data, how it was discovered, and the legal basis for the blocking request had not been disclosed, so it’s too early to say definitively whether the measure is effective.
*This article is composed from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (News Express+) thread “GMO Unauthorized Access Extortion Site: Ministry of Internal Affairs Requests Telecoms Force a Block“.
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