The headlines are making it sound as if Malaysia is bracing themselves for a natural disaster. In the wake of the increasing cyber attacks by hacktivist group Anonymous, word on the Web is that the group is launching an attack at 3:30am Thursday morning in a heist they call “Operation Malaysia.”
Several local hackers, when contacted, said at minimum the government portal would be defaced and at worse it would be brought down.
But they said the worst would be that the hackers pry personal, credit card or financial data from a government website, or an e-payment concessionaire such as MyEG.
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the F-Secure (News - Alert) Corporation a computer security software company based in Helsinki, Finland tweeted about the threat at 4:42am Malaysian time yesterday.
Several hours later, Anonymous announced its reasons for wanting to attack the government portal, which were posted in an open letter that started with “Greetings, Malaysia ...” on a website and in a video on YouTube (News - Alert).
“We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom, we are obligated to act fast and have no mercy,” it said in the video.
“We are aware of the hack threat and we believe that the threat is real. We have alerted the relevant parties and government agencies,” said Husin Jazri, head of the government's CyberSecurity Malaysia agency according to a report by AFP.
It said it was acting against what it claimed were various acts of censorship by the Malaysian Government and also because of the recent move to block file-sharing sites in Malaysia.
Despite recent arrests, threats of these kinds are on the rise and Anonymous is, so it seems, spread far and wide.
Some of the leading hackers from the cyber criminal group have been arrested by Spanish Police. The arrests took place in Barcelona, Valencia and Almeria Friday morning and a server hosted in Gijon was seized as part of the operation. The trio is suspected of being leaders in a key cell of the digital vigilante group that breaks into computers and systems online to pursue political activism.
Recently, the hacker group launched attacks on Turkish Government websites for alleged Internet censorship. Following that incident, Turkey arrested 32 people, suspected to be Anonymous members.
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Michelle Amodio is a TMCnet contributor. She has helped promote companies and groups in all industries, from technology to banking to professional roller derby. She holds a bachelor's degree in Writing from Endicott College and currently works in marketing, journalism, and public relations as a freelancer.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
