Hacker causes Bangladeshi waves

Roybot · Jul 3, 2013

PETALING JAYA: Malaysians got an unpleasant surprise when many .my websites that they surfed to brought a message purportedly from a Bangladeshi hacker to their screens.

They had expected to get to google.com.my, dell.com.my, youtube.com.my or skype.com.my when they clicked away at the computers on Monday.

Instead they got the message which told Malaysians to respect Bangladeshi workers here.

At first, it was thought that the individual sites had been hacked. But it was actually the domain name servers operated by MyNIC Bhd that had been compromised to redirect the websurfers to the hackers message.

MyNIC had been the sole agency responsible for .my domain names in Malaysia.

Google Malaysia later advised Malaysians via Twitter to go to its international webpages instead, namely Google.com and YouTube.com.

It is not currently known how many .my websites were affected or the origin of the attack. However, all affected websites were restored by yesterday.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Datuk Mohamed Sharil Tarmizi said that they are working with the police and have set up a joint team.

The MCMC is the regulator for the converging communications and multimedia industries in Malaysia.

MyNIC chairman Datuk Bridget Lai said in a statement that it viewed the matter seriously.

We have put tremendous effort to ensure our customers business operations and data integrity are protected.

We are undertaking all necessary measures to prevent further issues, she added.

Condition Zebra Inc, which markets risk management solutions, said websurfers who were redirected to the hackers message were not at risk.

They were not being targeted. The most that they suffered was loss of time and some degree of inconvenience, said its chief executive officer Drew Williams.

There have been cases of websurfers being redirected by hackers to phishing sites or sites loaded with malicious software to steal personal or corporate data.

Mondays incident is similar to one in April where localised Google, Microsoft, Dell and other major sites in Kenya, Malawi and several other countries were redirected to an animated webpage from seemingly the same Bangladeshi hacker.