Leakage of Information from the MOFA Network to the Internet

February 5, 2013
Japanese

On January 28, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conducted a survey upon receiving information from the National Information Security Center (NISC) and confirmed the occurrence of suspicious communication from a computer within MOFA with an external server on the Internet. At the present time it is suspected that approximately 20 documents were leaked from the computer.
This case occurred on an open LAN (a network connected to the Internet), which does not handle confidential information, and confidentiality classifications of the documents suspected to have been leaked do not fall into the category of “Confidential” (i.e. confidentiality class 2 or less).
Having received the above-mentioned facts, MOFA immediately implemented measures to prevent information leakage to the external server, and at the same time began analyzing details of the information leakage together with external experts.
MOFA will continue to make every possible effort to prevent information leakage and will thoroughly implement all possible countermeasures for information security.

(* The foregoing is a provisional translation. The date indicated above denotes the date of issue of the original in Japanese.)

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