The year is 2030. A “notorious mystery hacker” known as o Puppetry is wreaking havoc on the internet by seeping into the so-called cyberbrains of several people as well as “every terminal on the network.” As it turns out, Puppet Master is a creation of Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In other words, Puppet Master is what we would today call a government-sponsored hacker, or advanced persistent threat (APT). In this case, however, the “ghost” hacker goes rogue and is wanted for “stock manipulation, espionage, political engineering, terrorism, and invasion of cyber brain privacy.”
This is the basic premise of the Japanese cult classic anime”Ghost in the Shellwhich 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 manga of the same name, was released in May 1989.
To say that the Puppet Master story was ahead of its time might be an understatement. The World Wide Web, essentially what evolved from the internet as we know it today, was invented in 1989, the same year the first volume of the “Ghost in the Shell” manga — including the Puppet Master story — hit newsstands in Japan. (The World Wide Web went public in 1991.)
In the manga, when Puppet Master is caught, an employee from Public Security Division 6, an agency under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains that they have been hunting the hacker “for a long time” and “profiled his behavioral tendencies and code/technology patterns”.
“As a result, we were finally able to create a special attack barrier against the puppets,” the official says in the manga.
At the risk of extrapolating too much from a few sentences, the reality is that what the official describes is basically what cybersecurity companies, like antivirus companies, do every day to stop malware. Not only do they create the so-called signatures based on the malware’s code, but also based on its behavior and properties, known as heuristics.
There are other plot elements that proved prescient.
At the beginning of Puppet Master’s investigation, Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist and commander of the anti-terrorist unit Section 9, breaks into the Sewer Department’s network to locate a garbage truck. (These days, government hackers working for intelligence agencies often break into large networks to spy on specific individual targets, rather than extract data from the breached network itself.)
While this is happening, one of the scavengers confesses to his colleague that he hacked his wife’s cyberspace because he believes she is cheating on him. Soon after, we find out that he was using a computer virus that he got from “some programmer”. This is a clear case of domestic abuse through technology, or even stalkerware, which TechCrunch has investigated extensively over the past few years.
As it turns out, the abusive scavenger didn’t have a wife. His memories were all made up. Of ghost — essentially his mind or consciousness — was hacked by Marionette with the goal of using it to hack government officials. In a way, this is similar to what some advanced hackers do when they break into networks that they then use to hack their real target, as a way to cover their tracks by adding separation from themselves and the ultimate target.
Puppet Master as a government hacker, hacking networks to track targets or use them to attack other networks, and a jealousy-fueled hack aren’t the only exciting pieces of speculative fiction related to anime hacking.
John Wilander, a cybersecurity veteran who writes hacker fiction books, wrote exhaustive analysis of the film which highlighted details that refer to real-life scenarios. Wilander gave examples such as hackers reusing known exploits or malware to make performance more difficult, researching malware without notifying the creators and infecting themselves with it, and using computers for industrial espionage.
Obviously, the manga and anime take the basic – and realistic – premise of the Puppet Master as a hacker in more fantastical directions. The hacker, who turns out to be an advanced AI, can control people through their cyber brains and is self-aware to the point where — spoiler alert — he applies for political asylum and ends up suggesting that Kusanagi merge theghosts”, essentially their mind.
To understand how prophetic “Ghost in the Shell” was, it’s important to put it in its historical context. In 1989 and 1995, cyber security was not even a word yet, although the term “cyberspaceit was famously coined by science fiction writer William Gibson in his classic book, Neuromancer.
Computer security, or information security, however, was already a reality, and had been for a few decades, but it was a highly specialized specialty in computer science.
The first computer virus is believed to be the Creeper worm, which was released in 1971 on Arpanet, the government-developed network that became the precursor to the Internet. A handful of other viruses and worms wreaked havoc after that, before becoming ubiquitous when the Internet and World Wide Web became a reality.
Perhaps the first documented government spying campaign on the Internet was the one he discovered Clifford Stolla trainee astronomer who also managed the computers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. In 1986, Stoll noticed a 75-cent accounting error on the network, which eventually led him to discover that a hacker had broken into the lab’s systems. In the end, the hacker was tracked down and found to be feeding information from the lab and other US government networks to the KGB of the Soviet Union.
Stoll captured his many months of meticulous and painstaking research in the book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” a first-person account that reads like a very detailed and extensive report by security researchers analyzing a hacking campaign carried out by government hackers.
As far as I can tell, “Ghost in the Shell” creator Masamune Shirow has never spoken about the real-life events that inspired the hacking plot points in the manga. But it’s clear that he was paying attention to what, at the time, was a hidden world foreign to most people on Earth, who were still years away from being online, let alone knowing the existence of hackers.
