Cyber threats still under check - MyCERT

Malaysian Computer Emergency Response Team (MyCERT) department chief Megat Muazzam Abdul Mutalib said the recent threat made by hacker activist group Anonymous Malaysia recently was different from the one reported in 2015.

"In the threat in 2015, there was a specific agenda, that is dissatisfaction with the situation at the time and there was an element of (physical) threat. But in the latest threat, from what was mentioned, it is more related to dissatisfaction with database issues and data leaks.

"Among the purposes of these parties making threats is to obtain confidential information, disrupt services or express dissatisfaction," he said when contacted by Bernama Radio during the ‘Dalam Radar’ programme aired yesterday.

Anonymous Malaysia via a video that went viral on social media platforms recently threatened to hack government websites and claimed that Malaysia’s security system was at a low-level, which could allow the information to be easily leaked and sold by unscrupulous hackers.

However, as of Tuesday (Jan 26), the police said they had not received any reports of government websites being hacked.

Meanwhile, the National Security Council (NSC) through the National Cyber Security Agency (NACSA) issued a warning notice to all government agencies to take necessary measures to prevent and minimise the impact of the cyber threat.

In 2015, the media reported that the police arrested three individuals believed to be involved in uploading a video clip on YouTube entitled 'We Will Blast Malaysia'. The arrest followed the release of a one minute-28-second video clip using the ‘Anonymous Malaysia’ moniker, which showed a bomb blast incident in Bangkok, Thailand, and threatened a similar incident in Malaysia.

Megat Muazzam said there were still a handful of organisations that were not ready with their cyber threat management plan and he hoped the issue of online threats would be given serious attention by all parties including organisations, service providers and consumers.

He said the likelihood of authorities being able to detect the hackers was high, as each attack usually left a digital trace that could be tracked through a security system that had logs, and which could assist digital forensic investigations.