BN’s cyber-attacks designed to ‘rig’ the Sarawak polls

Sarawakians are prevented from seeking, receiving and sharing vital information that can help them decide on their representatives and government.


Both Sarawak Report and Malaysiakini have been experiencing unrelenting denial-of-service attacks that temporarily brought them down in the closing days of the Sarawak state election.

On April 16, around one million voters in Sarawak will choose their new state government. These alternative media sites have been dispensing vital information to help the Sarawak voters decide who they want to elect as their parliamentary representative and which party to lead them.

In order to exercise their right to vote, accurate and timely information about the candidates, political parties and election manifestos, as well as the crucial issues of the day and dirty tactics have all been reported by these sites.

When respected news portals like Malaysiakini and the independent media site, Sarawak Report were brought down, it must mean that the information these sites contained, was something that BN did not want released to the public.

Malaysiakini is a popular alternative online newspaper whilst Sarawak Report is a website which is critical of Sarawak Chief Minister Taib Mahmud.

Sarawak Report has published detailed allegations about Taib and his family’s extensive business interests, disproportionate wealth, massive land grabs, his properties in over four continents and his dependence on witchcraft (using bomohs) for making critical decisions of state.

Both these sites are currently experiencing a full-scale Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS).
Selangor Mentri Besar Khalid Ibrahim has condemned the cyber-attacks: “The cowardly actions of the perpetrators this close to election day reflect a deep insecurity about the upcoming results of the Sarawak elections. These attacks can only mean that parties sympathetic to BN greatly fear the spread of the truth – truth that will hasten the impending departure of Taib Mahmud and his corrupt government.

“This is exactly the same suppression of the groundswell of a popular uprising and the use of the internet to ignite a people’s movement that was seen in the Middle East revolutions,” said Khalid.

When ex-president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was faced with the popular uprising, one of the first things he did was to shut off the Internet and mobile phones, before blocking Twitter and Facebook. He knew that these tools were used to coordinate and spread the word about the demonstrations that were scheduled for Jan 25.
Without these mass organising tools, it is highly likely that fewer people would have known about the protests, or summoned the kind of courage that was made possible by knowing you’re not the only one sticking your neck out. Without them, fewer people might have shown up.

BN is afraid that by completely switching off the internet, it might hasten a revolution similar to the one in Egypt. That is why it has only attacked the sites it finds most threatening.

BN has tricked the Sarawak people of its riches. It has used Taib to divert most of the money derived from petroleum into the coffers at Putrajaya and possibly straight into Umno. Taib is allowed a free rein to do whatever he pleases with the rest of Sarawak’s natural resources, like timber.

Big money attacks

Malaysiakini was attacked on April 12, incapacitating its two locally hosted servers and forcing the owners of the paid subscription site to resort to Facebook, WordPress and other free publishing platforms to get their news out.

In the wake of these attacks, Malaysiakini has received a wave of public support.

“We’ve been receiving numerous phone calls and emails urging us to persevere,” said Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.

“Readers have also been very generous in making donations to Malaysiakini and we thank them for their support,” he added.

Malaysiakini has plans to deploy more servers to cope with the increased traffic over the next few days.
“We expect more than one million people to follow the Sarawak election results live on Saturday. We are preparing as much capacity as possible to support the traffic,’ said Premesh.

The cyber-attack which incapacitated Sarawak Report started on April 10.

Author and founder Clare Rewcastle Brown said, “The attack on Sarawak Report has been ‘unprecedented’, according to one of the largest hosting companies in the world, which has been forced to drop our site in order to continue operations.

“We suffered yet another distributed denial of service attack last night. It happened around 8pm UK time after a build-up over a number of hours. This was far larger than the previous attacks over the weekend, and separate to a hacking attack the day before.”
Clare said the website host, a major company in the US, said this was “something that went above what they know”.
According to her, a senior engineer from the hosting company said it was an unprecedented denial-of-service attack against the website, which was “so big that it was affecting their whole server infrastructure”.
“Therefore, we were kindly asked not to host our website with them again because they cannot handle such levels of attack.
“We are now up in a number of capacities, including WordPress. It is noted that WordPress, which is considered the world’s rock-solid hosting site, reported that for the first time yesterday they were nearly brought down by a hacking attack.”

Most organised hacker

If what the hosting companies say is true, then big money is behind all these cyber-attacks.
If WordPress, one the world’s biggest hosting sites was nearly brought down, then the people behind these attacks are afraid, and desperate.

With much to lose, BN and the people affiliated to it are prepared to silence Sarawak Report and Malaysiakini, so that the people of Sarawak are prevented from seeking, receiving and sharing vital information that can help them decide on their representatives and government.

How amusing that APCO, which must be orchestrating these attacks, has become one of the largest and most well organised hacker in the world.

By Mariam Mokhtar, a petroleum chemist and an environmental pollution-control scientist, is a columnist with FMT