Police brace for hackers' attack
New Straits Times (15 June 2010)

KUALA LUMPUR: Police are working with several government agencies in preparing for the "worst" in the event a group of international hackers carry out their threat against the country.

Calling themselves "Anonymous", the international hacker group has threatened to sabotage and disrupt the Malaysian government's official online portal tomorrow.

Federal Commercial Crime Investigation Department director Datuk Syed Ismail Syed Azizan said police were working with the National Security Council and CyberSecurity Malaysia in tracking and monitoring the group.

"We are looking at various measures to identify the hackers and take steps to prevent the attack." He said several IT experts had been roped in for this effort.

The group, believed to be made up of hackers worldwide, claimed they we r e targeting the Malaysian government after noticing unreasonable censorship in the country.

The group specified that the recent blocking of file-sharing and sites, such as The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks, as the reason for their outrage and threat.

In a message at pastebin.com, the group claimed that the Malaysian government's censorship was similar to taking away basic human rights.

"Malaysia is one of the world's strictest governments, even blocking out movies, and television shows.

"These acts of censorship are inexcusable," the group said. The group threatened to carry out the hacking, dubbed "Op eration Malaysia" at 7.30pm GMT (3.30am tomorrow local time) which can be accessed on a graphic poster at http://i.imgur.com/PTFWh.png.

The discovery of the threat was made by a computer security software firm officer in Finland, with an online notification at 4.42am yesterday.

Last week, Anonymous launched DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on Turkish government websites, in protest against the government's plans to introduce Internet filter ing.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission said it was working with other government agencies to coordinate security measures to mitigate the attack.

It said in a statement that it was aware of the planned cyber attack on the malaysia.gov.my website through news reports on the matter.