February 16, 2013, 7:55 AM — Japanese police believe they have finally caught the man behind an extraordinary malware campaign that included taunting police in January by sending them clues on an SD card strapped to a cat.
According to TV station NHK, 30 year-old Yusuke Katayama was picked up after Tokyo police accessed CCTV pictures that showed the accused near the animal not long before the memory card was retrieved from its collar.
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Katayama is alleged to have issued bomb threats against schools in the last six months, hijacking the PCs of uninvolved people using a Trojan in order to hide the origin of the messages.
It later emerged that police had attempted to coerce confessions from four of the innocent suspects which led to a hugely embarrassing climbdown when they were shown to be uninvolved.
Disturbing messages were also received by a lawyer in Tokyo and a TV station threatening suicide, backed up by a picture of an anime doll inside a noose made from Ethernet cable.
Finally in January of this year, the media received a message explaining that further clues would be sent to the police on an SD card attached to a cat's collar. This turned out to contain the source code for the remote-control Trojan used to compromise the PCs.
The motivation for the bizarre campaign appears to be resentment against the police and a desire to embarrass them at every turn.
Why police took so long to trace the accused might be an even bigger mystery; Japanese media reports Katayama as having a conviction for a similar unspecified crime in 2006.
