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Friday, 10 September 2010

Cyber attack: Anwar’s blog latest to be hit

The Malaysian Insider

SHAH ALAM, Sept 9 — Cyber attacks are suspected to be the cause of the inaccessiblility of news portal freemalaysiatoday.com (FMT), Raja Petra Kamarudin’s malaysia-today.net and Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s blog today.

Mohd Eekmal Ahmad, who is the Opposition leader’s media coordinator, confirmed that anwaribrahimblog.com was inaccessible.

“We are still investigation the cause of the disruption but the incidences are too much of a coincidence,“ he said.

FMT Editor K.Kabilan said the news portal has been under intermittent Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack for the last two or three weeks before it became inaccessible at 3am.

A DDOS attack is a concerted efforts to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently by saturating the website with external communications requests.

“We are trying our best to restore connection by today,” said Kabilan to The Malaysian Insider.

He pointed out that malaysia-today.net has also been hit by disruption for the last three or four days.

Meanwhile FMT’s chief technical officer Thirun Nadason, in a statement, said the they believe the DDOS is the work of professionals.

“Our tech team is working on ensuring that service can be provided uninterrupted,” he said.

FMTs’ managing editor Phllip Rodrigues condemned the attacks.

“This is the second time such an incident has happened but FMT will not be discouraged by such unscrupulous actions and will continue to report without fear or favour.

“FMT wishes to apologise to our readers for any inconvenience caused,” he said.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) yesterday said they detected a 50 per cent increase in hacking on Malaysian websites in the first week of this month.

They warned that unmonitored websites during festive seasons may lead to more attempts of cyber mischief.

A total of 262 web defacement activities in the first week of September compared to 168 cases recorded last month.

They also observed a similar high number of cases during Hari Raya last year.

The types of mischief includes the creation of false websites to deceive users and the deliberate altering of website content.

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