Mon Dec 7, 2:56 am ET

TOKYO (AFP) – A Chinese woman arrested in Japan for illegal entry had altered her fingerprints through surgery to fool a biometric security system at the airport, media reports said Monday.

Tokyo police confirmed they had arrested Lin Rong, 27, for entering Japan with a fake passport a year ago and then staying on illegally.

Local media said Lin was previously deported to China in 2007 for overstaying, but managed to sneak back into Japan last year after surgery to change the skin on her thumbs and index fingers.

The skin patches from the digits on her right and left hands were removed and then regrafted onto the matching digits of the opposite hand, Jiji Press news agency and major newspapers reported.

She told police she had paid some 100,000 yuan (14,600 dollars) for the surgery, leading investigators to believe Chinese brokers are arranging such fingerprint changes, the Yomiuri Shimbun daily said.

A police spokesman said investigators were looking into the possibility that she had changed her fingerprints but declined to comment in detail.

Reports said police noticed that her fingers had unnatural scars when Lin was arrested last month for faking a marriage with a Japanese man.

Japan’s airport security system matches the fingerprints of incoming foreigners to a database of wanted criminals and past deportees.

Computer keyboard

Canadian researchers say they have uncovered a China-based electronic spying operation that infiltrated computers in 103 countries.  While they say they have no conclusive evidence of Chinese government involvement, the targets of the computer espionage were political.  The cyber spying operation is one of the biggest and most sophisticated ever discovered.

Researchers at the University of Toronto call it Ghostnet – an electronic spying operation that infiltrated more than 1,000 computers around the world.  They say it targeted NATO, the Indian Embassy here in Washington and Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels and London.  Researchers say that in addition to stealing computer files, the cyber spies could turn on the internal camera on a remote computer to eavesdrop on live conversations.

Nart Villeneuve is with the University of Toronto’s Munk Center for International Studies.  He says that while the operation was sophisticated in its organization and scope, it used readily available Internet viruses called Trojans, attached to email messages to infiltrate computers.

“From a purely technical point of view, no, it was not that sophisticated,” said Nart Villeneuve. “The Trojan, the attacker favors, the ‘ghost rat;’ it’s open sourced.  You can go and download it.  It’s not like it is some clever special new way of doing it.  But the way in which the attacker was able to leverage these tools was sophisticated.”

The Toronto researchers uncovered the cyber spying operating when they were asked by the exiled Tibetan leader, the Dalia Lama to examine his organization’s computers for malware – malicious software that can infiltrate or damage a computer system.

Although the group cannot say whether the Chinese government was involved, they add that Ghostnet’s computers were almost exclusively located in China and that the targets were political.  They found infected computers in the Dalai Lama’s organization and were able to trace stolen correspondence back to the spy network’s computer servers in China.

The Chinese government has denied any involvement in the operation.

But James Lewis, a technology expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington says cyber spying is nothing new for the Chinese government.

“We know that they are interested as a government,” said Lewis. “We know that they’ve done it in the past as a government.  And the things that are being collected are of interest to the Chinese government.”

Lewis notes that many countries, including the United States and Russia, use computer technology to gather intelligence.

The University of Toronto researchers say an international agreement is needed to protect privacy rights and prohibit cyber spy operations like Ghostnet in the future.