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Japan’s Cyber-Attack System “Pure Ghost in the Shell”

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A Japanese-developed cyber-attack warning visualisation system has lately been earning massive praise for its beautiful graphics, and almost as attention again for its unmistakable similarities to a certain cyberpunk anime…

A video demonstrating the system, dubbed DAEDALUS (“Direct Alert Environment for Darknet And Livenet Unified Security”) and developed by NICT:

Briefly, the trails passing from the central sphere (the Internet) to the orbiting circles (networks) represent external traffic, and generate alerts if identified as suspicious, and the system also identifies and displays traffic patterns passing between networks.

A major objective of the system is monitoring malware activity within and without the network, and watching for DDoS attacks.

The system generates its alerts as XML data which can also be displayed as the boring charts and graphs full of endless hack attempts familiar to anyone charged with monitoring a computer connected to the Internet.

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Although it seems to have impressed less technical Japanese and non-Japanese alike with its pretty graphics and clear suitability as a screensaver, there is a certain amount of scepticism about just how useful it is:

“Cool!”

“Looks beautiful, finally we are in the 21st century!”

“It certainly looks easy to understand, but if your network security people can’t manage to monitor your network without something like this you have bigger problems… still, it looks cool.”

“Pretty pointless really, isn’t it?”

“A total rip-off of Ghost in the Shell!”

“They are obviously GitS-inspired. Looks so nice.”

“The ‘warning’ characters are straight from GitS or Eva.”

“Must have been made by aniota.”

“And the guys who made this are a government agency…”

“They said they intended to make it available to the private sector too. It looks great, but I get the impression once you get boarded of it you’ll be returning to your terminal screen.”

“Why is it only the overseas you guys are rejoicing!?”

“Really, this is just a screen-saver.”

“What is the point of making this 3D?”

“A simple graph would probably be more effective?”

“Next you will have people competing to see who can make the most cool looking attack on this system…”

“You couldn’t wait to be attacked if you had a system like this!”

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