Malaysia: Sites brought down by cyber-attacks

18 Apr 11 | Index Index, minipost

On 15 April, a number of opposition and news websites were subject to attacks by hackers causing them to crash. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack came in the run-up to elections in Malaysia’s eastern state of Sarawak. An online Malaysian news portal, Malaysiakini, was forced to get its news stories out via Facebook, WordPress and other free websites.

China: Google email services disrupted

21 Mar 11 | Index Index, minipost

Google has blamed the Chinese government for disrupting its services after users experienced problems with accessing their emails.  Some users have also claimed that their email accounts have been hacked into. Just over two weeks ago some Chinese Google email users were targets of hacking attempts that were described by Google as politically motivated, specifically aimed at activists.

Jordan: Top news site disabled by hackers

09 Feb 11 | Index Index, Middle East and North Africa, minipost

Jordan’s most visited news website, Ammonnews, was frozen by hackers for several hours on Monday. The cyber attack came a day after the website had published a statement critical of the government by representatives of 36 major tribes. The website’s chief editor Basel Okoor blamed state intelligence services for the disruption saying, “Only the Jordanian security services have the technical capacity to do this”. Government officials dismissed the charges and maintained that they had no hand in disabling the website.