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Aidila Razak
Jun 16, 11
1:50pm
A representative of Cyber Security Malaysia, an agency of the Science and Technology Ministry, today said that no preventive measure could have been taken to prevent the Anonymous hackers group from disabling the 51 government websites.
Answering a question in a panel discussion at the World Bloggers and Social Media Summit, its outreach department head Ahmad Izham Khairuddin said that this is because the hackers are a group of “very, very, very skillful” individuals.
azlan“It is very difficult for us to answer (how the hackers managed to cripple the websites), but we have seen that the same group has even attacked banks, the US Senate and even one intelligence agency recently.
“They are very, very, very skillful and have the knowledge to do this. We're not dealing with... someone in a garage hacking for fun. They are very serious,” he told the audience of 300 bloggers today.
Pinning it down to “sheer determination”, Ahmad Izham said likened the hackers to determined house robbers who will find a way to break in even if the house has “the latest alarm system, a watchdog and a security patrol”.
Saying that the government's cyber security expertise was “not bad”, Ahmad Izham, however, refused to elaborate on whether the government is confident of controlling the damage, saying “If you make a statement (of confidence) (the hackers) see this as a challenge.”
'No website can be completely hacker-proof'
Supporting him, fellow panellist Impact Malaysia global response centre director Anuj Singh said that no website can be completely hacker-proof.
However, he said, that there have been “a lot of proactive work by agencies in Malaysia” and that the country has been by and large more prepared than others for such an attack.
Asked if Malaysia would have legal recourse in the wake of the attack, Anuj Singh said that it would be difficult to do so if the hacker is doing it from outside the borders.
“We do not have globally-harmonised laws on cyber security,” he said.
Ahmad Izham said that if the hackers were identified to have waged the attack from Malaysian shores, they can be prosecuted under the Multimedia and Communications Act.
Today, the group disabled 51 government websites, with some still inaccessible at press time.
This is in retaliation to the government's last week announcement that it is blocking 10 top file-sharing sites including Pirate Bay and Megaupload.