Japan Developing Anti-Virus Virus to Defend Against Cyberattacks

Japanese media this week broke the news that the Japanese Defense Ministry is in the midst of a $2.3 million effort with partner Fujitsu Ltd. to design a so-called "good virus."

The virus will be able to identify, track and disable sources of cyberattacks, according to Yomiuri Shimbun, a Japanese national daily newspaper that broke the story.

Tested in a closed network environment, the so-called beneficial virus has the capability to trace cyberattacks back to its sources. The unnamed cyberweapon also goes beyond the immediate source of the attack and identifies “springboard” systems that were used to transmit the virus.

Once identified and tracked, the good virus disables the bad virus and at the same time collects “relevant data” for later computer forensics, according to Yomiuri Shimbun.

Sources within the ministry familiar with the project claim the virus has a “high degree” of accuracy in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as well as those attacks intended to siphon off data from targeted computers.

The news of yet more cyberweaponry is not all good. Ever since the Stuxnet virus struck Iran's nuclear enrichment program back in 2010, talk of cyberwarfare is growing increasingly loud. Recently, sources within the British Defense Ministry spoke of developing offensive cyberweapons as a “strike first” capability against a potential attack. In addition, many security experts in the United States say any virus -- even those labeled as beneficial -- is dangerous and can have unexpected consequences.

“An out-of-control good virus could spread randomly or unexpectedly from machine to machine, meaning it may be hard to contain,” said cybersleuth Graham Cluley, who noted any program that uses viral code can also be designed with non-replicating software.

At present, most of today’s antivirus software would attempt to bring down any virus even one that some call beneficial.

The idea of a beneficial virus is not new. In the 1990s Vesseliln Bontchev wrote a paper on the concept of fighting bad viruses with a useful virus. The paper was titled, Are Good Computer Viruses Still a Bad Idea?

Is an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth the right approach? Japan's Defense Department thinks so. But for the rest of us it is something to consider, especially when we know where good intentions often lead.

 The country that brought us such user-friendly products as Toyota, anime and Nintendo Wii is now promising or menacing us, depending how you view it, with a good computer virus to fight bad viruses. In this year of elections, the vast majority of us are still undecided.