Government's resident information system hacked

Via Slashdot-J, Kyodo News (article in Japanese) is reporting that the government's Juki Net, a system for storing citizens' information, has been successfully broken into in a test by Nagano Prefecture. The central government is attempting to enforce the use of the system by all local governments to streamline the management of various kinds of information held on residents; from the outset, however, some local govs have opted out of the scheme, citing security and privacy concerns. The prefectures are connected to Juki Net via VPN rather than dedicated lines, and if the results of the Nagano experiment are as the initial report claims, fears about security appear to have been right on the mark.