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The year is 2030. The notorious “mysterious hacker” known as Puppet master It wreaks havoc on the Internet, invading the so-called cyber minds of many people Besides “Every station on the network.” As it turns out, the puppet master is the creation of the Japanese Foreign Ministry.
In other words, the puppet master is what we today call a government-backed hacker, or an advanced persistent threat (APT). But in this case, the “ghost” hacker goes rogue and is wanted for “stock manipulation, espionage, political engineering, terrorism, and breach of cyber privacy.”
This is the basic premise of Japanese anime classics Ghost in the shellwhich celebrated its 30th anniversary this week since its debut, and is based on the chapters titled Bye Bye Clay and Ghost Coast from the first volume of the manga of the same name, Released In May 1989.
To say that the story of The Puppet Master was ahead of its time would be an understatement. The World Wide Web, essentially what blossomed from the Internet as we know it today, was invented in 1989, the same year the first volume of the book was released. Ghost in the shellThe manga – including the Puppet Master story – has hit newsstands in Japan. (The World Wide Web was publicly launched in 1991.)
In the manga, when the Puppet Master is arrested, an official from Public Security Division 6, an agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains that they have been pursuing the hacker “for a long time”, and have “identified his behavioral tendencies and software/technological patterns.”
“As a result, we were finally able to create a special anti-puppeteer attack barrier,” the manga official says.
At the risk of extrapolating too much from a couple of sentences, the truth is that what the official describes is essentially what cybersecurity companies, like antivirus companies, do every day to stop malware. They don’t just create so-called Signatures Based on the malware code, but also based on its behavior and characteristics, known as Inference.
There are other elements of the plot that turn out to be prescient.
At the beginning of the investigation into Puppet Master, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist and leader of the anti-cyber-terrorism unit Section 9, hacks into the Sanitation Department’s network to track a garbage truck. (These days, government hackers working for intelligence agencies often break into large networks to spy on specific individual targets, rather than pulling data from the compromised network itself.)
While this is happening, one of the garbage men confesses to his colleague that he hacked his wife’s electronic brain because he thinks she is cheating on him. Right after that, we found out that he was using a computer virus that he got from “some programmers.” This is a clear case of Technology-enabled domestic violenceor even Stalking programswhich is owned by TechCrunch Investigation On a large scale on last A few Years.
As it turns out, the abusive garbage man never had a wife. His memories were all fabricated. for him ghost -His mind or consciousness basically-has been hacked by a puppet master with the intention of using it to infiltrate government officials. In a way, this is similar to what some advanced hackers do when they infiltrate networks which they then use to hack into their actual target, as a way to cover their tracks while adding separation from themselves and the end target.
The Puppet Master as a government hacker, hacking into networks to track targets or using them to attack other networks, and hacking fueled by jealousy aren’t the only great bits of speculative hacking fiction in anime.
Written by John Wilander, a veteran cybersecurity expert who writes fictional books about hacking Comprehensive analysis of the film Which highlighted details that reference real-life scenarios. Wilander gave examples such as hackers reusing known exploits or malware to make attribution more difficult, investigating malware without alerting the authors and infecting yourself, and using computers for industrial espionage.
The manga and anime clearly take the basic – and realistic – premise of the Puppet Master as a hacker into more fantastical directions. The hacker, who turns out to be an advanced artificial intelligence, can control humans through their electronic brains, and is so self-aware that — spoiler alert — he seeks political asylum and ends up proposing to Kusanagi to merge…ghosts“, basically their minds.
To understand how prophetic Ghost in the shell It was important to put it in its historical context. In 1989 and 1995, cybersecurity was not yet just a word, although the term “Cyberspacecoined by science fiction author William Gibson in his classic book, Neuromancer.
However, computer security, or information security, was already a reality, and had been for several decades, but it was a very specialized discipline within computer science.
It is believed to be the first computer virus Creeping The worm was unleashed in 1971 on ARPANET, the government-developed network that became the forerunner of the Internet. A handful of other viruses and worms wreaked havoc after that, before becoming ubiquitous once the Internet and World Wide Web became a reality.
Perhaps the first documented government espionage campaign on the Internet was the one he discovered Clifford Stollan astronomer by training who also ran computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In 1986, Stoll noticed a 75-cent accounting error in the network, which eventually led him to discover that a hacker had compromised the lab’s systems. Eventually, the hacker was identified and it was found that he was feeding information from the lab and other US government networks to the KGB.
Stoll immortalized his meticulous and painstaking, months-long investigations in the book Cuckoo egga first-person account that reads like a very detailed and comprehensive report by security researchers analyzing a hacking campaign carried out by government hackers. the Cuckoo egg It has since become a classic, but it’s probably fair to say that it didn’t quite hit the mainstream when it was released.
As far as I can tell, Ghost in the shellCreator Masamune Shirow has never spoken about the real-life events that inspired the hacking plot points in the manga. But he was clearly paying attention to what was, at the time, a hidden world that was foreign to most people on Earth, who were still years away from being online, let alone being aware of the existence of hackers.