As Japanese Bring Work Home, Virus Hitches a Ride
TOKYO — So far it has spilled military secrets and the private phone numbers of TV stars, airport security access codes and elementary school children's grades.
And the dirty work of this computer virus may not be done.
With almost daily reports of more private information being pumped from personal computers and splashed over the Internet, there is a growing unease that Japan is under insidious attack from within.
The culprit is a digital worm that infects computers using the file-sharing Winny software, a Japanese computer program that, like the infamous Napster, was designed to allow people to easily swap music and movie files.
Normally such leaks would mean nothing more serious than acute embarrassment to victims whose personal photographs or private video collection gets uploaded onto the Web for anyone to see. But the particular danger of this virus, dubbed Antinny, stems from the fact that it has exploited what turns out to be a bad Japanese habit.
This is a country where millions of people are taking their work home with them. On personal computers.
Soldiers and securities traders, doctors and cops in Japan have become accustomed to loading job-related data onto their personal computers to work after hours. But with many of those computers also running Winny software, chunks of confidential data have been surreptitiously leaked online, where they are extremely difficult to expunge.
The list of betrayed secrets is long and getting longer: personal details of 10,000 prisoners from a Kyoto prison officer's computer; information about crime victims, informants and statements from suspects uploaded from a policeman's home computer; access codes to 29 airports from an airline pilot's PC; and the details of surgical procedures on 2,800 patients at a private hospital from the computer of a clerk. All have found their way onto the Internet.
No one knows who developed the virus, though different versions of Antinny have been attacking computers for at least two years.
"The issue is not the quality of the virus," says Takefumi Tanabe, a software advisor at Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. "The issue is the quality of the information being leaked."
Perhaps most embarrassing have been the leaks from Japan's Self-Defense Forces, including data on surface-to-air missile tests and details of "Battle Scenario Training" for a simulated crisis on a transparently code-named "K Peninsula."
