MALAYSIA ON RED ALERT – HARMLESS OUTAGE OR ‘SOMETHING MORE SINISTER’: BE VERY CAREFUL DOING ONLINE BANKING OR PAYMENTS THESE FEW DAYS – OUTAGE AT .MY DOMAIN SUSPECTED, CLAIMS REPORT

Due to a purported outage of the .my domain over this weekend, users of Malaysia’s online banking sites are advised to be cautious with submitting personal information.

A report on Lowyat.net said that DNS servers which handle the .my domain names appear to have gone offline since yesterday and that this affects all .my domain websites.

While some sites are still functional via DNS cached entries, it said these sites with .my domains will become inaccessible once the caches expire.

“Most of Malaysia’s online banking sites are hosted on the .com.my domains, so until this issue is resolved, we advise extreme caution on submitting your credentials to any online services that are hosted on the .com.my and .my domain names,” the report said.

The outage also affects mobile banking apps and several online payment channels, it added.

A DNS (Domain Name System) server translates and resolves easily remembered web addresses into IP addresses for the computer to process.

MYNIC Berhad, the Malaysian registrar of .my domains, has confirmed earlier today in a posting on Twitter that they are experiencing technical issues with the DNS system.

“We feel sorry for any inconvenience to the customers.

“We are working hard to resolve this issue as soon as possible. More details will be issued from time to time,” it said.

Lowyat.net noted that MYNIC has had issues with DNS hacking and DNS poisoning in the past.

“Without detailed information, we cannot ascertain whether this is just a harmless outage of the service, or if it is something more sinister,” the report said. 

Malaysiakini has attempted to contact MYNIC on whether the issue has since been resolved and what caused it in the first place. -MKINI

Malaysian websites with ‘.my’ domains affected as Mynic hit by glitches

PETALING JAYA: All Malaysian websites whose addresses end with the “.my” domain, including The Star Online, will be experiencing difficulties because the domain registrar is experiencing difficulties.

Mynic Berhad, the sole agent responsible for the domain, confirmed it was suffering a technical issue.

“We are working hard to resolve this issue as soon as possible. More details will be issued from time to time,” it said on Twitter on Saturday.

Lowyat.net had earlier reported that the Domain Name System (DNS) servers responsible for “.my” domain names seem to have gone offline.

“This means that all .my domains will be virtually inaccessible across the World Wide Web,” the technology news portal added.

Mynic comes under the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia and is regulated by the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC).

In the past few years, it has been hit by similar issues, with its own servers being compromised. This allowed hackers to redirect all website access to fake sites.

The most widespread attack was in 2012, affecting the Malaysian websites of multinationals such as Dell, Microsoft, MSN, Skype, Bing, Kaspersky, YouTube, and Google. This was followed by another attack in 2013, this time affecting the Google Malaysia website only.

In 2015, Mynic’s servers were again compromised, this time affecting the Google Malaysia and Yahoo Malaysia websites.

In all these cases, MCMC said it would investigate the breaches. – ANN

MKINI / ANN