After decades taking the same (largely reactive) tack as the rest of the world, Japan is now flipping the script and perhaps setting a new cyber standard for others to emulate, passing a law that authorizes preemptive cyber strikes.
A bold move in any context, this is especially ambitious for Japan. The country has long maintained a pacifist defense posture rooted in its post-World War II constitution, in which Article 9 famously states:
“The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes.”
This commitment to peace has deeply influenced its approach to national security, including cybersecurity.
As head-turning as this move is, it didn't come out of nowhere. Looking back, we shouldn't be entirely surprised. Japan was first set on this new, more aggressive course a little over a decade ago. During Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's time in office (2012–2020), Japan's began re-examining its place in the world and rethinking its principled pacifism and the passivity it entailed in the face of threats.
Abe reinterpreted Article 9, pushing through controversial legislation allowing his government to invest more power and resources in the Japan Self-Defense Forces. Significantly, the legislation made it possible for Japan to proactively intervene in defense of an embattled ally, even if Japan itself was not directly threatened.
This was followed by another controversial piece of legislation package in 2015 that authorized the military to participate in missions abroad.
Under Abe, cybersecurity also gained new prominence as a national defense priority. Japan established its first National Security Council and released a National Security Strategy that included cyber defense.
The 2015 Cybersecurity Strategy guidance document, and its more assertive 2018 revision, laid out a grand vision for the nation's digital defense — acknowledging cyberattacks as national security threats and signaling Japan’s intention to build capabilities to respond proactively.
As Japan's military doctrine adopted a more assertive approach, any holdover sensibilities for restraint were put to the test with an onslaught of cyber attacks. In recent years, the country has been battered by a wave of cyber incidents that would make any CISO’s head spin.
China, for example, launched waves of attacks including the MirrorFace espionage campaign (2019–2024), targeting Japanese ministries, aerospace firms, individual politicians, and tech companies to steal sensitive data. The 2023 breach of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) was also attributed to Chinese hackers.
Meanwhile, Russia-linked groups such as BlackSuit and Killnet have been associated with attacks aimed at disrupting Japan’s infrastructure and sowing geopolitical instability, including attempts to infiltrate government and energy sector networks amid global tensions. North Korea also maintains a robust cyber espionage and financial theft campaign against Japan, with groups like Lazarus targeting banks and the crypto sector.
Beyond nation-state attacks, Japan has also faced additional threats, including:
Hundreds of millions in unauthorized trades linked to hacked brokerage accounts.
A massive breach at telecom giant NTT, affecting nearly 20,000 corporate customers.
A six-year exposure by game developer Ateam, which unknowingly left a Google Drive folder public — leaking names, emails, and device IDs of nearly 1 million people (almost all of whom were customers).
That last one wasn’t the work of elite threat actors, by the way. It was a simple misconfiguration that created six years of exposure. A true palm-face moment and a reminder that cybersecurity failures don’t always come from the outside — often, they stem from within. In fact, 88% of breaches are rooted in human error.
Japan’s newly enacted cybersecurity legislation marks a definitive break from its traditionally restrained posture. For decades, constitutional pacifism and strong privacy protections limited state authority in the cyber domain. This law changes that.
At its core, the law consolidates Japan’s fragmented cyber response architecture into a more centralized framework. It grants military and law enforcement agencies the power to proactively monitor foreign internet traffic — both inbound and transitory — and to take preemptive countermeasures, including offensive cyber operations.
This centralization extends beyond state institutions. Critical infrastructure operators in sectors like finance, healthcare, and energy are now legally required to report security breaches to the government. Where reporting was once voluntary and often avoided for fear of reputational harm, the new mandate ensures greater transparency and a higher likelihood of early threat detection.
The legal formalization is not just procedural — it is philosophical. Japan is signaling a shift from a reactive, wait-and-see approach to a posture of anticipatory action. As Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshimasa Hayashi put it, the law enables Japan to “identify and respond to cyber attacks more quickly and effectively.”
Critically, this isn’t a blank check for state power. The legislative route ensures democratic oversight and embeds privacy safeguards. By codifying these powers, the law builds public trust, establishes checks and balances, and sets the foundation for coordinated, cross-agency responses rather than fragmented, ad hoc interventions.
Some may argue that formal legislation is unnecessary — cyber counterattacks are often covert, and attribution remains murky. But codifying these capabilities is not about optics. It’s about permanence. Once a power is granted, it rarely recedes. By placing these authorities under legislative scrutiny, Japan is acknowledging the risk of future misuse and taking preemptive steps to mitigate it.
Ultimately, this law positions Japan to become a serious cyber power — one that acts with both resolve and responsibility. The doctrine of preemption is no longer theoretical. It is now national policy.
Codifying the nation's new offensive cyber stance raises some important questions — both ethically and strategically. For example:
What counts as a credible threat?
Who decides when a strike is justified?
What happens when attribution is wrong or collateral damage is high?
It is easy to see how this could destabilize global cyber norms, inviting retaliatory strikes or fueling escalation or even a vicious tit-for-tat cycle of attacks, with each party claiming they are merely returning fire.
If that happens, it can unleash the kind of no holds barred chaos that would make Japan long for the comparative calm of today.
Even so, the rationale behind the legislation is easy to appreciate. Cyber adversaries move fast, hide well, and don’t play by the rules — which makes sticking to a purely reactive model increasingly outdated.
Ultimately, the wisdom of Japan's philosophy is yet to be seen. Until then, we maintain our position of cautiously optimism.
While Japan’s law is making headlines, the lesson extends far beyond the island nation: security must shift from reactive to proactive.
Traditionally, cybersecurity on the enterprise level has operated like emergency response — wait for the breach, then act. But that model won't keep you safe as threats mount and move at a breakneck pace.
Organizations must adopt an aggressive posture that anticipates and disrupts threats before they can materialize, and shift from reaction to anticipation. From defense to prevention.
While nations can debate the ethics of striking first, there’s absolutely no gray area when it comes to locking your own doors. Consider that 73% of organizations have at least one critical security misconfiguration. These oversights practically roll out the welcome mat for even the laziest of bad actors, and it should come as no surprise that over 80% of ransomware attacks exploit misconfigurations.
Proactive configuration management can make all the difference, but the bitter truth is that most organizations don’t act until it’s too late.
To close the gap, organizations need a way to reliably:
Maintain real-time visibility into endpoint risks
Know exactly what’s misconfigured or vulnerable and where — the first critical step to locking your digital doors.
Enable hardening without compromising business continuity
Enforcing strict configuration policies and pushing smart changes without inadvertently triggering downstream disruptions.
Continuously monitoring for security drift
Prevent your security posture from slipping over time.
Effective cybersecurity is about anticipating, hardening, and acting — consistently and confidently. Indeed, enterprises that embrace aggressive hardening and continuous, proactive defense will be the ones that survive and thrive in today’s complex cyber landscape.
Japan's rewriting the rules of the game. And we should all be paying close attention. If it works, we'll all be following suit — and the sun may well set on the age of reactive security.
Whether it’s a government rewriting its cyber doctrine or a company reevaluating its defense stack, the message is the same: security must be proactive. Because in today's cyber battlefield, waiting for an attack is a losing strategy.