(Petaling Jaya, Saturday): The Parliament website, http://www.parlimen.gov.my/, had been hacked at least since yesterday, and my attention was drawn to it by the Penang DAP State Secretary, Wong Hon Wai, in the Penang DAP Mutiara-net mailing list last night.
The frontpage of the Parliament homepage was obliterated and replaced with a black background with the words:
We do not exist, Yet we are everywhere!"
The hacking of the Parliamentary homepage (or cobwebsite, to be more exact) was not noticed earlier as it is one of the least-visited Internet sites in the country or among the world’s Parliamentary homepages - an utter disgrace to Malaysia’s ambitious plan to be an IT-savvy nation.
Hacking of official government websites in other countries is not an uncommon occurrence, highlighting the problem of computer system security, and among the high-profile targets of hacking in the United States, for instance, were the White House, United States Senate, the FBI, the Army, the Navy, NASA and the Departments of Agriculture, Labor and the Interior, computer systems at Georgetown University, the University of Colorado, the University of Michigan and Harvard University as well as some of the largest and most popular commercial sites on the World Wide Web like Amazon.com, eBay, E-Trade, CNN and Yahoo.
In fact, in the United States, Federal computer security experts have been warning system administrators to take added precautions in securing Web servers and network firewalls in advance of the New Year's holiday weekend, citing FBI reports indicating an increase in activity that often precedes widespread cyber attacks.
The US government fears that tens of thousands of computer systems may have been turned into "zombies" waiting for commands from hackers to cripple the Internet. Unsuspecting users continue to operate their computers in a normal way but a vast number of computers may now contain a software time bomb which could launch dedicated denial of service (DDOS) attacks to bring down computer networks by overwhelming them with more traffic than they can process.
The hacking of the Parliamentary website is not a cause for surprise, as the Universiti Technology Malaysia (UTM) website, http://www.utm.my/, has been hacked by the same group, leaving the same defacement on both sites.
The hacking of the parliamentary website, however, should raise two questions, firstly, on the security and quality of the parliamentary homepage and the other, even more pertinent, on the quality of e-goverment that is being introduced in Malaysia.
The first question to be raised is whether and when Malaysia is going to introduce a world-class e-government with 24/7 mindset, i.e. where an important characteristic of government in the Information Society is the availability of public services online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to the end-user whether at home, at work or on the move.
How can there be a 24/7 mindset of e-government service when webmasters like those responsible for the Parliamentary homepage could be unaware of hacking of their sites for days, when they should be immediately alerted in a matter of hours if not in minutes!
Let the hacking of the Parliamentary homepage focus greater national
attention on Malaysia’s lagging behind international progress towards
electronic delivery of public services when we should be in the forefront
because of the nation’s ambitious Multi-Media Super Corridor project.
(30/12/2000)