Last autumn, a number of government websites and other sites came under attack. However, the recent attacks are different from sophisticated cyber-attacks that aim to steal information. Experts call for people to respond calmly by taking necessary steps in advance without fearing them too much.
Late at night on September 3, the website of the Hiroshima National Peace Memorial Hall for the Atomic Bomb Victims became inaccessible. Shortly after, a group saying it was Anonymous and opposed to dolphin hunting and other issues posted a statement online claiming responsibility.

 

An official at the memorial hall said in bewilderment, "We have nothing to do with dolphin hunting."

 

It is believed a series of Anonymous attacks called Operation Killing Bay started around 2013 in protest against Japan's whale hunting and the annual dolphin hunts in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, in September.

 

Last year, to protest against the dolphin hunting in Taiji, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks were launched against government offices websites and infrastructure operators such as airports. DDoS attacks are aimed at rendering websites and other online services unavailable by sending a huge amount of data to the server.

 

According to police, the number of cyber-attacks Anonymous is believed to be involved in has grown since September. There were no cyber-attack-related website problems from May to August, but 29 incidents were confirmed in September, followed by 26 in October. From November 1 to November 27, there were 53 cases, bringing the total from September to November 27 to 108.

 

In comparison, incidents ranged between the 10s and 20s each month from September to November last year, but rose to 56 in December.

 

"Their aim is not to make websites unavailable, but to promote their presence," said Nobuhiro Tsuji, senior security researcher at SoftBank Technology Corp.

 

This year, the targets of the attacks have conspicuously been small organisations and shops such as izakaya Japanese pubs, and groups totally unrelated to dolphin hunting. "The hackers could be different from last year, and their resources could be smaller," Tsuji said.

 

When Anonymous started around 2006, it advocated the establishment of the freedom of the internet and made political appeals through legally permitted activities such as street demonstrations.

 

Currently, however, Anonymous tends to carry out cyber-attacks with the aid of unknown individuals who respond to invitations on Twitter and other websites. Participants are increasingly committing cyber-attacks for fun.

 

The website of the Kasumigaura river office of the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry came under attack in 2012. Anonymous is believed to have confused Kasumigaura with Tokyo's bureaucratic district of Kasumigaseki. The incident was indicative of the group's sloppy management.

 

Anonymous' main attack method, DDoS, can be committed without significant expertise. Basically, there is no way to defend against such attacks. It is a matter of waiting for an attack to cease, although measures have recently been developed to mitigate damage.

 

"Compared to cyber-attacks aimed at stealing information, DDoS attacks are not so sophisticated. In most cases, the websites attacked went down and that was it," said Masakatsu Morii, a professor at Kobe University specialising in information and telecommunications engineering.

 

Some observers point out that such cyber-attacks could increase ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Morii said, "It is important that companies and organisations take necessary measures calmly. If they are attacked, they should respond coolly without overreacting."

 

It is estimated that billions of dollars were lost in a year due to fake traffic, fraudulent clicks, and various other scams. But there is little motivation to stop it because of the manner the online-advertising market is structured with many layers of middlemen and ad-networks.

 

In fact, the growth of sophisticated bot-nets and other types of click fraud is one of the reasons why less than half of all Internet ads are even seen by humans, according to a research conducted by comScore in 2013, an online analytics firm.

 

White Ops, a New York-based firm, has named the operation "Methbot" because of references to meth hidden in the computer code underlying the scam, and said it is the biggest and most profitable fraud operation yet to assault digital advertising. The company said that the scam is believed to originate from Russia using a so-called bot net to fake views of as many as 300 million video ads per day and trick advertisers to pay for views which were never seen by humans.

 

While Methbot had its own devoted servers running its software, several bot-nets are created out of ordinary PCs owned by innocent victims, who download "malware" or malicious programs from the Internet. Software can be installed in the background by clicking on a link or a popup ad which then captures the computer for different purposes. 

 

As hacking by Russian government dominating headlines all over the world, Michael Triffany, CEO of White Ops, said that this scam is perhaps not being run by the Kremlin although it has massive size and sophistication.

 

White Ops said that to fight the fraud, it will release known IP addresses associated with Methbot to enable advertisers and their agencies to block them. The company added that it will release a fake domain name and full URL list to show where this phony activity has been taking place.

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