INTERVIEW: Former U.S. Cyber Chief Urges IT Reform in Japan

Tokyo, May 26 (Jiji Press)–Chris Inglis, who served as the first U.S. national cyber director in 2021-2023, emphasized on Tuesday the need for Japan to foster public-private cooperation to address vulnerabilities in the nation’s aged information technology systems. There are “many weaknesses” in systems that have been deployed in Japan for 20 to 30 years, Inglis, who held the post under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, said in an interview with Jiji Press in Tokyo. The interview took place at a time when cyberattacks targeting corporations and government agencies are increasing in the Asian country. Japan needs to “form collaborative partnerships between the private and public sectors” to revamp such outdated systems. Currently, so-called legacy systems, for which operations and maintenance work are difficult, are still widely used in Japan, hampering efforts to install measures against cyberattacks and promote digital transformation. Inglis acknowledged that Japan is working to establish public-private partnerships in the medium term. Still, he said the country needs to figure out how to “invest necessary time and attention to create resilience” in digital infrastructure and to “mobilize all of the authorities and all of the resources of the society” to deal with the issue in the longer term. Regarding measures related to U.S. startup Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, a cutting-edge artificial intelligence model, which is highly capable of detecting system weaknesses, Inglis stressed the importance of understanding how to build systems without vulnerabilities. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]