Bracing For Cyber Attacks
10th March 2005 (Malay Mail)
BY Eddie Chua

KUALA LUMPUR: Brace yourselves for a cyber war!

This is the warning to local webmasters and system administrators in the wake of escalating attacks on Government-related websites over the past week.

The Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team (MyCert) issued an alert yesterday, notifying server administrators to tighten up their systems and install the latest security patches to ward off attacks.

The warning came after another 10 Government-related websites were hacked and defaced yesterday.

"They should take preventive measures to prevent their sites from being targeted," MyCert manager Solahuddin Shamsuddin told The Malay Mail yesterday.

"System administrators should ensure there are no 'backdoors' to access their servers."

Since March 1, more than 20 Government websites have been defaced. However, the attacks escalated over the weekend with the hacked sites being posted with political slogans.

Yesterday's attacks were the most serious in a single day.

Solahuddin said they anticipate more of such attacks in the coming days.

He said MyCert is offering free security consultation and scanning to local servers to test the vulnerability of their system.

MyCert also issued a guideline to system administrators yesterday to help them prevent such attacks.

"We hope that the reminder will help to reduce the number of attacks and defacements," said Solahuddin.

In the attacks yesterday, the Energy, Water and Communication Ministry, Perak Museum, Perak royal family, the Customs Department, and the Malaysian Centre for Geospatial Data Infrastructure in Sabah were defaced.

Hackers also hit Klpages.com.my, an online directory, and a forum site.

All the sites defaced were shut down and at Press time, none had been revived.

The Malay Mail reported yesterday that dozens of Malaysian websites, mostly of Government-related agencies, had been hacked

The National ICT Security and Emergency Response Centre (NISER) said they are worried about the trend and have asked web-owners to provide them with the logs (records) to enable them to analyse and track down the attackers.