More than 25 billion cyberattacks on the Japanese government and other bodies were logged last year, an agency said on Tuesday, with 40 percent of them traced to China.
The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), which has a network of a quarter of a million sensors, said there were 25.66 billion attempts to compromise systems, according to a report by Kyodo news agency.
The figure includes attacks aimed at testing the vulnerability of software used in servers. The survey was first carried out in 2005, when it recorded just 310 million attempts to breach security.
NICT said an increasing number of the attacks it was seeing involve attempts to take over routers, security cameras and other systems connected to the Internet.
TRACED TO CHINA
Of the cyberattacks the agency was able to trace, 40 percent originated in China, while South Korea, Russia and the US also figured prominently.
Compromised Internet security is an increasing risk for firms around the world and in all sectors.
A Russian report released on Monday said that cyberattacks since 2013 have cost banks around the globe up to US$1 billion.
Sony Pictures was the victim of a cyberattack last year in which embarrassing e-mails were leaked to the press in an incident US authorities blamed on North Korea.
Pyongyang was incensed over The Interview, a film about a plot to assassinate the country’s leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea has officially denied any involvement.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts