PETALING JAYA, Tues: Police have traced the persons involved in the hacking of the Parliament website to Brazil and France and want the police in the two countries to help nab them.

However, the nationality of the suspects is still not known, said a police source, who added that the hacker's Internet Protocol (IP) address had been traced.

An IP address is a 32-binary digit number that identifies each sender or receiver of information that is sent in packets across the Internet. The police source said in the event our local police fail to get a reply from their French and Brazilian counterparts, investigations into the identity of the hacker will continue with the assistance of Interpol. The hacking is being investigated under Section Five of the Computer Crimes Act 1997, with offenders liable to be jailed a maximum of seven years or fined RM100,000 or both, upon conviction.

The Parliament website at www.parlimen.gov.my was hacked in late December, and the hacker, who identified himself as "Topeira" had wiped out all information on the website and replaced the homepage with words in a foreign language.

When contacted, Malaysian Administration Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (Mampu) Information, Communication and Technology security unit director Azman Musa said the first page of the Parliamentary homepage has been up since Monday.

"The links will be up soon," he said. He also added that his unit is providing assistance to the Parliament's information security department. He said security features for the site has been strengthened "to make it more difficult for casual hackers although we cannot totally prevent hack attacks".

When contacted, Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team (MyCert) project head, Raja Azrina Raja Othman, said that the recent media attention on computer security has brought about greater awareness on security concerns. Since the media first highlighted the hacking incident, MyCert has received 50% more enquiries from system and application developers, system integrators and network and system administrators.

She said the main concerns are: