Cyberattacks hit 19 Japan websites amid Chinese protests

At least 19 Japanese websites including those of government agencies have come under cyberattacks since the Japanese government decided Sept. 11 to nationalize the Senkaku Islands claimed by China, the National Police Agency said Wednesday.

Noting that more than half of the 19 sites had been cited as the targets of cyberattacks on the message boards of a Chinese hacking group or on major Chinese chat sites, an NPA official said the attacks appear to have originated in China.

The cyberattacks made it impossible or difficult for 11 of the 19 websites to be browsed. Among them are those of banking, power utility and other private-sector companies as well as government agencies including the Defense Ministry and the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry.

The websites might have become subject to so-called "distributed denial-of-service" attacks, which flood sites with massive data.

The cyberattacks tampered with the other eight websites, including those of the Supreme Court and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, leading them to display pictures of the Chinese national flag.

The Tokyo Institute of Technology said the website of its Center for the Study of World Civilization came under attack, causing personal data of 1,068 participants in the center's events to be leaked. The data included their names and telephone numbers.

While failing to link the attack to the anti-Japan demonstrations that have broken out in China in protest to the nationalization of the Senkakus, the university said the website's screen was covered with images of the Chinese national flag. It shut down the site Saturday.

Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Tatsuo Kawabata said the site of the ministry's Statistics Bureau came under cyberattack intermittently for a combined seven and a half hours since Saturday.

On Sunday afternoon, when the attack was most intense, 95 percent of traffic to the website was from China, Kawabata said. The operations of the website returned to normal Wednesday morning and the contents of the site have not been tampered with, the ministry said.