Anonymous threatens www.malaysia.gov.my

The Star carried an interesting but serious news on a credible threat aimed at the Malaysian official government website www.malaysia.gov.my

Malaysian governments websites have been targeted in the past and were mostly defacement of the websites. The most recent last large scale defacement involved the controversy of the tourism video advertisement done by the Tourism Ministry of Malaysia which accidentally include scenes from a traditional Indonesian dance as part of the Malaysia heritage. This spark an outcry from Indonesia to protest of the 'hijacking' of heritage including mass defacement attacks on government and webpages affiliated to Malaysia.


The group Anonymous has been identified as the attack group and plans were posted online detailing date and time  and the specific target of the attack.

 
Anonymous was thrown into the limelight for the alleged involvement in attacks on Sony Playstation Network (PSN)
 
We will be monitoring this threat and update the blog accordingly.

Update: 15 June 2011
CyberSecurity Malaysia has confirmed that they have received complaints and are viewing the threat very seriously. A high level meeting between the security agency and other government agencies including the NSC (National Security Council) was held in relation to this threat.

The cause cited by Anonymous for the planned attacks is that that act of banning 10 file sharing websites in Malaysia by government is the root cause for the planned attack. Furthermore, RIM(Recording Industry of Malaysia) now wants to add more to the list of banned sites.

Update: 16 June 2011
Several state related websites were defaced as of this morning. These defacement activity does not look like the work of the group Anonymous but opportunist.

The website malaysia.gov.my is unavailable as as 0850am. 

Update 17 June 2011

Malaysia.gov.my is finally back up and running. The Star reports that 91 websites were compromised with 50 belonging to the government. Speculation is rife that the administrators of malaysia.gov.my had intentionally pull the plug on the website to preempt the supposed attack. 

I suppose the element of surprise is gone when you publicly announce that you are going to attack someone. Read Randy's blog about who Anonymous is and the irony behind the name.

Letting this case rest in peace.