Rais On The Defensive: Operation Malaysia Snuffs Out 51 Sites

Written by  Melissa Lee

Malaysians awoke to the prospect that their entire stable of government portals might be collapsed by anonymous attackers retaliating a recent decision by Information minister Rais Yatim to block 10 file-sharing sites, which the attacked viewed as Internet censorship.

A hue and cry also broke out on the social media network on the pro cons of this lesson for Prime Minister Najib Razak's administration, which has in the past threatened to instal a filtering system akin to China's propsed Green Dam in a bid to silence political dissenters from using the Net to reach out.

"THis is not about foreign versus local. It may be a form of Net terrorism but as they say, what is a terrorist to the Malaysian government is a freedom fighter to some Malaysian Internet users," PKR vice president Tian Chua told Malaysia Chronicle.

"I am not going prejudge anything, let's see how far they go. In principle, we cannot support any form of terrorism but let's see if this constitutes terrorism or is it a good reminder to the powers that be, that this ia new age where the establishment is no longer King."

MCMC Confirms Attacks

So far, the attack codenamed Operation Malaysia has brought 51 websites down, although many are already back on their feet again.

Industry regulator, Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, has confirmed that there were attempts to hack several Malaysian government websites, including its own, www.skmm.gov.my.

"Regarding the threat by unknown hackers to attack websites with the .gov.my domain, there were indeed attempts to hack several Malaysian government websites," the MCMC said in a statement out on Thursday.

"These attacks started at approximately 11.30pm, on Wednesday, June 15. We are able to confirm that 51 .gov.my websites were attacked and there has been disruption at various levels to at least 41 of those websites. However, we do not expect the overall recovery to these websites to take long as most websites have already recovered from the attack.

"Our monitoring of the situation showed that there was a reduced level of attacks by 4.00am this morning (Thursday) and upon further evaluation, so far we gauge that there has been little impact on Malaysian users as a result of this attack.

"The public is advised to report any information they may have regarding the identity of these hackers as the act to disrupt network services is a serious offence, which is punishable by law."

Offline Or DDOSed

Meanwhile, Rais denied that Malaysia practised Internet censorship and assured that his ministry had sufficient security measures to fend off the attacks.

“This is something we have not expected but we have faced this threat a few times before," Rais told reporters.

“We have informed the authorities to be aware of it; we have been taking the necessary preventive action through Mampu (Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit), MCMC (Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission) and agencies responsible for security."

Meanwhile, according to the Star, the www.malaysia.gov.my portal targeted for attack at 3.30am Thursday by a foreign-based hacker group has been offline since midnight. Several other Malaysian Government websites are also offline.

Speculation is rife on blogs and Twitter, the micro-blogging site, with some believing that the hacker group that calls itself Anonymous has launched a distributed denial-of-service attack on the websites.

Others, however, seem equally sure that local authorities have unplugged the servers of these sites, either in an attempt to spoil Anonymous' plan, or to buy more time for website security to be upgraded before putting the sites back online.

Securitynewsdaily.com posted that the malaysia.gov.my website became unresponsive around midnight, most likely due to a denial-of-service attack.

This method of attack involves bombarding the website with an ever increasing amount of requests that it eventually becomes unable to handle all the queries and crashes.

On Twitter, some said they don't believe it was due to plug-pulling, while others stated that it was. One person tweeted that he received e-mail messages advising him to switch off servers, but did not provide more details when contacted through Twitter.

The other government websites that were offline include www.parlimen.gov.my, www.rmp.gov.my (Royal Malaysian Police), www.treasury.gov.my (Ministry of Finance), and www.mocat.gov.my (Ministry of Culture, Arts and Tourism).

Parliament, Treasury And Police Sites Up Again

But the Parliament, Treasury and Police websites came back up before 9am.

Among the unaffected are the websites belonging to the Ministry of Defence, Department of Islamic Development, the Election Commission, and Tourism Malaysia.

Anonymous had threatened to hack the malaysia.gov.my portal to protest against the Malaysian Government's censorship of the Internet, movies and TV shows. And because Malaysia had banned and called for the blocking of 10 filesharing sites. These sites were among the most visited by Malaysians to illegally download movies.

Some sites are avidly tracking the attacks. Below is one such portal:

Hacked/down websites will be updated from time to time, do tell us if you have any information regarding this and the websites affected. Sites tagged with [Down] indicator means either it has been DDoS-ed or switched off by government. Confirm first whether the site are down or not by visiting this page http://www.isup.me/    (http://orionids.net/blog/operation-malaysia-list-of-affected-websites-update/)

Malaysia Official Government Website [link] – [Down]

- SabahTourism.com [link] [Hacked][Leaked]
- CIDB [link] [Hacked] [Up]
- Land Public Transport Commision [link] [Suspected]
- Malaysian Meteorological Service [link] [Down]
- ASEANconnect [link] [Suspected]
- Hollywood-Artist.info [link] [Suspected]
- Ministry of Education [link] [Down]
– Suruhanjaya Pilihanraya Malaysia [link] [Down]
- Bomba [link][Down]
- TMNet [link] [Down]
- Perbendaharaan Malaysia [link] [Down]
- Kementerian Kerja Raya Malaysia [link] [Down]
- Parlimen Malaysia [link] [Down]
- JobsMalaysia [link] [Down]
- Kementerian Penerangan, Komunikasi dan Kebudayaan [link] [Down]
- Portal KSM [link] [Down]
- Majlis Sukan Negara [link] [Down]

- Malaysia Chronicle

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