PETALING JAYA: The www.malaysia.gov.my portal targeted for attack at 3.30am today 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 includewww.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).
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.
Warm Regard, Sara Pandian
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