The year is 2030. An “infamous mystery hacker” known as the Puppet Master is wreaking havoc on the internet, breaking into the so-called cyber-brains of several humans as well as “every terminal on the network.” As it turns out, the Puppet Master is a creation of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In other words, the Puppet Master is what we would call today a government-backed hacker, or advanced persistent threat (APT). In this case, however, the “phantom” hacker goes rogue and is wanted for “stock manipulation, spying, political engineering, terrorism, and violation of cyber-brain privacy.”
That is the basic premise of the Japanese anime cult classic Ghost in the Shell, which marked its 30th anniversary this week since its debut, and was based on the chapters titled Bye Bye Clay and Ghost Coast from the first volume of the eponymous manga, released in May 1989.
To say that the story of the Puppet Master was ahead of its time may be an understatement. The World Wide Web, essentially what flourished from the internet as we know it today, was invented in 1989, the same year that the first volume of Ghost in the Shell’s manga — including the story of the Puppet Master — hit newsstands in Japan. (The World Wide Web publicly launched in 1991.)
A scene from Ghost in the Shell’s manga, depicting an official from Public Security Section 6 and the Puppet Master. (Image: TechCrunch.)
In the manga, when the Puppet Master gets caught, an official from Public Security Section 6, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains that they had been after the hacker “for a long time,” and they “profiled his behavioral tendencies and code/tech patterns.”
“As a result, we were finally able to create a special anti-puppeteer attack barrier,” the official says in the manga.
At the risk of extrapolating too much from a couple of sentences, the reality is that what the official is describing is basically what cybersecurity companies, such as antivirus firms, do everyday to stop malware. Not only do they create so-called signatures based on the malware’s code, but also based on its behavior and properties, known as heuristics.
There are other elements of the plot that turned out to be prescient.
At the beginning of the Puppet Master investigation, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist and commander of the counter-cyberterrorism unit Section 9, hacks into the network of the Sanitation Department to track a garbage truck. (These days, government hackers who work for intelligence agencies often break into large networks to spy on specific individual targets, rather than to siphon data out of the hacked network itself.)
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