Fishing boat armada? Check; Threat to dump JGBs? Check; One thing was missing, and that was cyberwarfare, aka #OccupyJapaneseServers. That too has now been checked. Globe and Mail reports [8]that at least 19 Japanese websites, including those of a government ministry, courts and a hospital, have come under cyber attack, apparently from China, police said Wednesday. Many of the websites were altered to show messages proclaiming Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyu islands, a Japanese-administered chain Tokyo calls Senkaku, the National Police Agency (NPA) said in a statement. The NPA has confirmed that about 300 Japanese organisations were listed as potential targets for cyber attack on the message board of Honker Union, a Chinese “hacktivism” group, it said.
More:
The police also confirmed around 4,000 people had posted messages about planned attacks and schemes on China’s leading chat site “YY Chat”, it said.
The targeted sites include those of the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry and Tohoku University Hospital, police said.
The website of the ministry’s statistics bureau seemed to have come under a “distributed denial of service (DDoS)” attack, where huge volumes of data are sent in a short period to paralyze the targeted server, Kyodo News said.
On Sunday afternoon, when the attack was most intense, 95 per cent of traffic to the bureau’s website was from China, Kyodo said, citing minister Tatsuo Kawabata.
Obviously, for now all the "warfare" is purely in the prank department, and while threats of a bond war are serious, they are just that: threats. Expect to see Tim Geithner flying to China and/or Japan to explain that the situation really should be diffused asap, and certainly before the first week of November, because any undue stress may impair his chances of that much desired windowless cubicle at Goldman Sachs or [insert any other bailed out bank here] once his reign of Treasury Terror finally comes to a close.