Japan moves to protect infrastructure from cyber attack

The Japan News reported that the Japanese government will meet with officials from the operators of the country's infrastructure to discuss action. The report said that the government will revised its Guideline for Establishing Safety Principles for 14 areas of crucial infrastructure at a conference at its Cybersecurity Strategic Headquarters in April.

The 14 fields are: information and communication, finance, aviation, airports, railways, electricity, gas, government and administrative services, medicine, water, logistics, chemical industries, credit cards, and petroleum.

In past months products of two Chinese manufacturers of telecom equipment Huawei and ZTE have been increasingly excluded from government procurement in western countries for security reasons. The US started to ban the use of products of these two companies in 2017 while the UK's BT excluded Huawei from its core 5G network last October. The Japanese government excluded the products in last December last year, according to a Japanese daily paper Mainichi.

The Japan News said that Japanese companies in each field will be encouraged to store data in Japan and they "have considered adding the storage of data on servers in Japan to their safety standards".

"There have been global concerns about the two companies’ ties with the Chinese government. But we need to make sure that we will not stop the recent trend of improvement in Japan-China ties," a Japanese government source said in a report of Japantimes last December.

Last October China and Japan agreed to cooperate on 50 international infrastructure projects in third countries, as part of a wider agreement on "third-party market cooperation".