Welcome to the digital world. That was not the actual wording of the message hackers left on Japanese government Web pages this week, but it was the meaning for anyone who bothered to read between the lines. This week's incidents were an embarrassment, or at most a nuisance. Next time, the damage could be much greater. It is past time for the government to take serious action to safeguard its communications networks and prevent future hacker attacks.

The attacks followed a conference held in Osaka over the weekend in which participants argued that reports of large-scale Japanese atrocities during the Nanjing Massacre remain unverified. The fact that the symposium took place -- and in a public, city-sponsored forum -- triggered Chinese protests, both official and otherwise.

In the four days since the conference, computer hackers have broken into computers several times at the Science and Technology Agency, the Management and Coordination Agency and the Economic Planning Agency. Most of the attacks were pure vandalism: Web pages were defaced and a link to a pornographic site was installed; in one case, however, data were reportedly erased. (They were retrieved from backup files.) It is assumed that private citizens are behind the assaults on the computers.