Missing the point

by Dr Hsu

The Malaysian Insider carries 2 headlines on its homepage today. One is:

Government portal brought down, 51 sites attacked

The second is:

MCMC shrugs off Operation Malaysia, says ‘little impact’

Hacking another person or organisation’s web page is of course very wrong. I don not condone the actions of these hackers.

But MCMC has missed a point here, too. Even though many of the websites are back to normal operation soon after the attacks, the fact that the sites were down even for a few minutes show how vulnerable these sites are. If there is any personal information and data in these sites, it would have been hacked and obtained by the hackers.

MCMC has missed another point . The attacks have put Malaysia in world news, but for wrong reasons.

Malaysia is now probably known as a country that infringes on basic human rights of file sharing, asa country that reneges its promise not to censor internet. This will result in many of the internet community shunning this country, among them many IT experts and companies and investors too.

As I have mentioned in my last post, it is actually very simple to by pass the block. I have tried it after some of the websites blacklisted by our government become inaccessible due to the ISPs blocking the sites. After configuring my DNS to Google DNS (8.8.8.8), I have no problem going to the sites again, not to download, but just to try out how easy it is to bypass the block.

What will be next?

Probably the vulnerability of the websites would be cited as reasons to get outside ‘experts to re-design the pages.

Probably many millions extra would be spent, going by the rate a facebook webpage costs the tax payers. Probably many people would be happy for these extra spendings, since there will be leakages and wastages as usual, and those beneficiaries will be laughing to the banks.