Japan to set up DARPA-style institute to tackle evolving threat of cyber warfare

Japan’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) is set to launch a DARPA-style research institute focused on cyber warfare in October 2024.

The agency will be government-run with the aim of developing innovative cyber war technologies. DARPA itself has a strong reputation around the world for pushing technological boundaries, running challenges that draw innovation to particular areas of research and developing solutions to problems that hold back whole sectors of industry.

That remit will be mimicked by the Japanese institute which will be based in Tokyo but will focus on the realm of cyber warfare.

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The term cyber warfare is often misleading, because it refers to the weaponisation of a previously civilian criminal skillset for military purposes. Cyber attacks in general terms are expected to cost victims a total of US$10.5 trillion in 2025 worldwide, which primarily includes commercial hacking, ransomware and data theft.

Cyber warfare is the use of those same nefarious cyber skills in a dedicated military or semi-military way against the infrastructure of a particular country or countries, to cripple or radically change the political infrastructure of the victim-nation. Everything from crippling hospitals more effectively than any missile could, to hacking democratic elections to achieve results that favour the nation of the attackers counts as cyber warfare. Likewise, the skills and methods employed to negate any such cyber war attacks.

There has been an assumption in some defence quarters that cyber warfare is in no sense equivalent to “hardware”-based warfare, the business of missiles and fighter aircraft, and that it still belongs entirely to the civilian and commercial world of technology battles.

As society becomes increasingly dependent on its technology to function, however, cyber warfare is becoming as relevant as “traditional” warfare. For instance, between January 2022 and November 2023, almost 4,000 cyber attacks were recorded against Ukrainian targets by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine, a 300% increase on the same period the year before the war. Most of them came from Russia as part of a “cyber front” designed to weaken the country’s infrastructure before and during its invasion of Ukraine.

A more recent example was given by a Microsoft report on August 9 2024 which uncovered an Iranian cyber warfare attack on the 2024 US elections. The report claimed that “an Iranian network known as Storm-2035 continues to operate four websites masquerading as news sites that are actively engaging US voter groups on opposing ends of the political spectrum with polarizing messaging on issues such as the US presidential candidates, LGBTQ rights and the Israel–Hamas conflict”. 

Japan’s new Defense Innovation Technology Institute will form part of its five-year plan to strengthen its defence posture against oncoming and evolving threats such as cyber warfare. Other research projects wrapped into the budget for the strengthening of Japan’s defences include electromagnetic warfare, information gathering using satellites and communication interference technology.

“Where military use of cutting-edge civilian technologies is changing the modes of warfare, it is necessary to fundamentally reinforce defence capabilities at an epoch-making speed,” the Japanese MoD explained. Many of the Institute’s initial 100 staff are expected to come from outside the government including experts in cyber warfare, AI and robotics.