Hackers have carried out their threat to the government of Malaysia that its websites would be targeted on Wednesday. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) has said that 51 government websites have been attacked and 41 of those were disrupted.
Yesterday, online hacktivist group Anonymous had said that hackers would target Malaysian government websites over of censoring the Internet.
The attacks started just before midnight and targeted websites with the .gov.my domain, according to an AFP report.
However, the MCMC has said that the hack attacks were unsuccessful and that most websites have already recovered.
The MCMC said, "The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission confirms that there were indeed attempts to hack several websites."
"However, we do not expect the overall recovery to these websites to take long as most websites have already recovered from the attack," it added.
The commission has said that it is working with agencies and security experts to counter the threats by hackers.
Yesterday, the Malaysian government beefed-up its cyber defences in response to the latest threat from Anonymous. The hacker group had said that it would unleash ‘Operation Malaysia’ on the government portal from Wednesday 1930 GMT. ‘Operation Malaysia’ is intended to be a revenge act against government censoring of whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. The threat from the hacking group is also believed to be in response to the ban of 10 file-sharing sites in Malaysia.
In a posting on pastebin.com, Anonymous had warned, "The Internet is here for freedom, without fear of government interference."
"We fear that if you make further decisions to take away human freedom. We are obligated to act fast and have no mercy."
Malaysia’s Information Minister Rais Yatim said that Anonymous had "misunderstood realities of the day", adding the move to ban the sites were meant to censor cyber crimes.
