Hacker’s Quest Led Japanese Police to Memory Card Carrying Cat

The recent news from Japan is a kind of entertaining: some anonymous hacker has let the cat out of the bag, stringing the local police along with a series of clues which led them to finding a memory card attached to a cat’s collar.

The hacker in question has sent threats to various places across the country, including schools and a kindergarten, through several computers around Japan. It’s been months that the police were puzzled and failed to track the sources. Indeed, the newspapers claim that Japan’s National Police Agency was caught chasing its tail: at one point, the police went as far as to force so-called confessions from 4 people who appeared to be completely innocent and had nothing to do with the threats.

On New Year’s Day, the newspapers and broadcasters received a set of riddles, apparently meant for the eyes of the authorities. One of the newspapers, the Sankei Shimbun, revealed that the received email offered an invitation to a new game and notified of the existence of a new computer virus. The most interesting thing was that the virus was hidden on a cat somewhere near Tokyo.

The emails contained a number of riddles, which promised the newspapers that they were on to a big scoop. The answers to the riddles appeared to lead towards a mountainside just outside of the city. The police finally found the cat and the memory card attached to it.

Although the authorities are not sure about the purpose behind the messages just yet, they still believe that the original messages were related to the ones which led the police to finding the card carrying cat.