Japan probes possible cyber attack by Anonymous on health ministry website

The website of Japan's Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry remained inaccessible as of Saturday Afternoon after the government confirmed the website initially went down Friday night.

The international group of hackers known as Anonymous may be responsible for the attack, officials said, following a message posted on Twitter suggesting the group disabled the site by flooding it with enough data to crash its servers.

The method of attack is known as "distributed denial-of-service," or DDoS in short. Ministry officials said they were working on restoring the site and corroborating whether it was Anonymous who attacked the site and the possible reasons behind the attack.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Police had been on high alert following the attack, according to local media reports, with the latest attack coming on the heels of the website of the Organizing Committee of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics suffering a similar cyber attack on Nov. 5.

The company hosting and operating the committee's servers said they disabled the system following an unusual amount of traffic, which they deemed was a deliberate attempt to crash the servers.

The committee and the government said they were as yet unaware of the motive for the attack and investigations were underway.

Following a similar attack on the 2012 London Olympics website, Tokyo officials said last month they would bolster their efforts to combat cyber attacks, by establishing a dedicated entity to train personnel to deal with digital information gathering.

The attack garnered a great deal of media attention due to the fact that an international conference on cyber security, backed by the World Economic Forum, was held in Okinawa, Japan's southern most prefecture, the weekend following the attack.

The conference's agenda was based around the central theme of how to effectively guard against potential cyber attacks in the period before and during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

While neither the government or the committee was able to confirm whether Anonymous were responsible for the Olympic or health ministry's website breach, Japan had been no stranger to cyber attacks from the clandestine group.

On Oct. 10, both Narita and Chubu airports in the east of the country, came under DDoS attacks with Anonymous saying on Twitter the attacks were a part of their campaign against Japan's controversial dolphin hunting practice.

In 2012, the government was also subjected to a series of cyber attacks by Anonymous following the implementation of new ant-piracy laws by the government, which outline stiff fines and jail terms for those downloading copyrighted content, with the group highlighting the fact that content suppliers were pressuring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to implement surveillance technology in an unprecedented move that some felt impinged on privacy laws.

As a result, the Finance Ministry, Supreme Court, the then ruling Democratic Party of Japan and Liberal Democratic Party of Japan all saw their sites attacked, some with specific pages defaced. Endit