Recovery when disaster strikes

In this year’s 2008 FIRST security conference, keynote speaker, Microsoft's George Stathakpolous showed us some statistics which indicated that Japan had the least amount of malware infections in the world by a huge order of magnitude.

In addition Japan is a country that has had to cope with a large amount of natural disasters and yet they are still one of the most feared economies in the world. 

For example in 1995, one of the worst known earthquakes known hit Japan and you may be interested to read the 10 year retrospective report on the earthquake from Risk management Solutions Inc.

Losses from the Kobe Earthquake (also known as the Great Hanshin Earthquake) were truly immense.

In all, over 6,400 people were killed and 15,000 injured. Fires consumed 82 hectares (203 acres) of urban land, and more than 400,000 buildings were damaged, of which 100,000 collapsed completely.

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A similar number were partially damaged, and thousands more sustained minor damage (see Figure 4). Two hundred thousand housing units were either partially or completely destroyed, and 85 percent of the region’s schools, many hospitals, and other major public facilities sustained heavy damage. 

http://www.rms.com/Publications/KobeRetro.pdf

How did Japan’s industries develop such robustness and defence against natural and man-made disasters such as cyber attacks?  Well unfortunately I can’t tell you! 

But I am allowed to write about one keynote speaker for the FIRST 2009 Kyoto event which is the Vice President of Japan Rail.

He will be talking about Japan Rail's defences to cyber warefare and risk management strategies and how they managed to get back most of the rail infrastrucutre witin a few months after the Kobe earthquake disaster had wiped out most of the Japan Rail rail system.

Also if you would like to hear more about why you should attend this security event, then do listen to our podcast with the Director of technical operations of the Japanese Cert, Yurie Ito.