TOKYO, Dec. 31, 2023—China’s aggressive cyberspace hacking is being felt in the United States, Europe, Taiwan and all over the world but rarely do you hear about it in Japan. Is Xi Jingpin sparing Japan from its intervention? There was a curious incident on Dec. 28, 2023.
Products of Hoyu Co., Ltd. of Nagoya, Japan, a 118-year-old hair color manufacturer, had been banned for imports to China because of its production process problems that were found out by the Chinese on on-line analysis, according to Japanese media reports Dec. 28.
It’s rare that China has conducted an on-line inspection of a foreign company and even rarer that an trade ban was decided based on meager analysis data available on-line. This has raised speculation that the Chinese might have hacked into Hoyu’s computer system and tinkered to insert false data.
Chinese cyberspace assault has been reported as daily affairs in other countries over the past months, filtering into power grids, nuclear power facilities, central government functions, but except for intermittent news reports, in Japan, the Chinese infiltrations have been treated as rare cases. Among a few news reports are Black Tech’s potential threats and hacking attempts to the Japanese Defense Ministry computer system this summer to fall. Japanese news media reported about the MOD hacking only after American news reports.
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