Amid the crossfire of a cyber warfare

We tend to presume there is a war going on in cyberspace, where the governments of the more autocratic countries are trying their level best to curb dissent among their citizens which could dislodge them from power. China is known to be introducing ways and means of banning certain networking sites to prevent the spread of 'lies against the government' (a common expression), for instance. Singapore, too, must be doing so in their own ways. Malaysia, is not far behind, and in some ways, could even be worse, depending on how one views about what is going on here.

Raja Petra, the man who is synonymous with the well known website, Malaysia Today, has been described by some as the greatest influence on the political awakening which brought to the fore, the possibility of a viable, alternative government in place of Barisan Nasional.

He took pains to describe himself as an activist rather than a politician. He is not interested in the nitty gritty of being a Member of Parliament or a State Assemblyman, a position he could have had with his popularity. I believe he is such a free spirit that he cannot be a party man, bound by written as well as unwritten rules of a political party as well as what is expected of a politician. He is an asset to those in search of a clean and transparent government, regardless of political leanings.

His 'No holds barred' and 'Corridors of Power' columns in Malaysia Today carry news and gossips which are much sought after by those in search of alternative news as well as damning allegations against the powers that be which has got him in trouble. Though a fugitive, the columns continue to be published, much to the annoyance of the leadership, especially those affected by the allegations.

Known for 'shooting the messengers', our government has tried all sorts to curb the spread of 'lies against the leaders'. One way is to frustrate net surfers from accessing the site, which is more subtle than outright ban which goes against government's promise to keep the internet free from controls.

What happened to Malaysia Today

By Malaysia Today’s technical team

With so much confusion and speculation making its rounds about what is happening to Malaysia Today over more than a week, we are compelled to offer our explanation so that the record can be set straight. Only limited technical details will be mentioned to allow you to appreciate the scale of challenge the site is facing.

You may now be aware that the site has been up and down since Friday, 17 September 2009. This was due to malicious activities by those behind the effort to cripple Malaysia Today. This is just one of the many rounds of cyber-attacks that we atMalaysia Today have had to face for more than a year now.

Coincidentally, this latest round of attacks started immediately after RPK’s explosive expose two weeks ago on Tuesday regarding the Malaysian Cabinet's knowledge and 'approval' of the PKFZ scandal long before it became public knowledge. Suspicious activities against the site happened as early as Wednesday, but the first damage was done in the afternoon of Thursday, which brought the site down.

The site was quickly recovered and by 6.00pm we were up and running again although with some loss of data. The attack revolved around the long-time problem faced by the site - a rather old version of Joomla content management system and the use of third-party components.
Lack of resources (financial, manpower, etc.) has always been a challenge faced by Malaysia Today, which affected the maintenance and operations of the site. During the recovery process, we locked down the site to reduce the danger of further compromises.

The next wave of attacks came the following day on Friday. This time it was in a wave of DDoS traffic crippling one of our nodes at Singapore. The Singapore node operates with about 30Mbps of bandwidth, a luxury by Malaysian standards but far short if we need to match any serious DDoS attacks. The node was basically choked with illegitimate traffic. Typical of DDoS network attacks, the origin of the attacks is difficult to pinpoint and sometimes pointless as the attack agents/zombies are likely compromised systems themselves.

We then activated our resources at our US node to recover the site. The process required optimisation of the site to cope with demand. (The demand on the site seemed much higher, possibly due to the interest on the PKFZ expose.) Hence the intermittent site outage, due to either overloading or optimisation process.

Being a service provider of a larger scale and sophistication, the US node has a higher capability of sustaining the attacks. Still, the attacks persisted on a daily basis and we tried deflecting them as far as we could. The DDoS traffic we suffered ranged from 227Mbps to 835Mbps, a mammoth scale for anyone familiar with maintaining Internet sites. The attacker does not appear interested in defacing the website, typical of self-styled college hackers. He/she just deleted articles published onMalaysia Today, literally one by one, with the single-minded aim of erasing all the explosive stuff on the site.

Further complicating the trace of attacks is the use of free proxy servers, on random basis, by the attackers. This is an irony, as we have been advising our users to use such proxy servers to overcome any potential content filtering by the government.

All the malicious activities and behaviours bear the hallmark of professional, for-hire hackers. These are certainly no amateurs, judging from the persistence and frequency of the attacks, with the main objective of making the content ofMalaysia Today inaccessible to the public.

We believe that there is NO explicit blocking of the site by the various Malaysian ISPs. The inconsistent and intermittent accessibility of the site in the past many days are the result of the situation described above, although we must caution that it is almost impossible to detect any clandestine censorship.

The MCMC has in the past failed to silence Malaysia Today officially through blocking it in August 2008. Now, with even more revelations of various scandals of the government exposed through this site, we can't help but suspect that there is a more significant force, a hidden hand at play aimed at bringing down Malaysia Today.


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