Cyber attacks are fast becoming an important weapon in international conflicts.

These attacks often target a country’s critical national information infrastructure and are aimed at crippling and shutting down a nation’s economy, business and administration networks.

While most of it still involves website defacement done mainly to attain bragging rights, more are worryingly politically or militarily motivated.

Last September, it was reported in ITWeek that France had become the fourth country, after Britain, the United States and Germany, to speak out against alleged hackers from China following an attack on French government systems.

France’s secretary general for national defence, Francis Delon claimed that the country’s systems had been compromised and that the evidence pointed to China.

September also saw hackers, reportedly from China as well, attack computer networks of the British government.

In June, US officials claimed that the Chinese military had successfully hacked into computers inside the Pentagon.

In February 2006, Chinese hackers launched attacks against major Japanese companies by defacing their websites and putting up anti-Japan slogans as retaliation against what they perceived as Japan’s increasing hard line against China.

Local scene

In Malaysia, reported cases of cyberattacks have fluctuated over the years.

Last year, intrusion cases reported to CyberSecurity Malaysia totalled 897. In 2005, this number was 467.

Until last October, 369 cases related to intrusion were reported to CyberSecurity Malaysia.

In September, about 30 Malaysian websites were allegedly defaced by Indonesian hackers retaliating against reports of an Indonesian karate referee who was beaten up by Malaysian policemen a month prior.

However, the good relationship between CyberSecurity Malaysia’s Computer Emergency Response Team (MyCERT) and its Indonesian counterpart managed to handle the situation and curbed further damage.

Malaysia has also faced website defacement in March 2005 with 216 websites hacked by Indonesian hackers during the conflict on the Ambalat issue, a maritime border dispute.

But the world’s largest archipelago has also faced cyberattacks of its own.

In April 1998, hackers threatened to sabotage Indonesia’s banking system if the country rejected the upcoming vote on East Timor’s independence.

East Timor resistance leader, Jose Horta warned that hackers were designing a dozen computer viruses to infect computers if the ballot on the territory’s future was tampered with.

Elsewhere

Last year, more than 600 Danish websites were defaced including the website of the newspaper, Jyllands-Posten (www.jp.dk), that posted controversial caricatures of Prophet Muhammad.

Angry Muslims sent out e-mail worldwide to stage a protest by boycotting Danish products such as dairy products. This reportedly incurred a loss of RM5mil daily.

Reacting to the attacks on the country’s websites, an e-mail message was circulated urging people to take part in a web-based attack on Arab media.

In 2005, a group of Pakistani hackers used the conflict in Kashmir as their reason for defacing 600 Indian websites and take temporary control of several Indian government and private computer systems.

Much of the group’s damage came in one attack, where they broke into IndiaLinks, India’s largest Internet service provider, and defaced over 500 sites hosted there.

These kinds of attacks can clearly take a toll on e-commerce as online transactions may be made vulnerable to attacks and as a result this could affect revenue for entire countries.

The affected country will also incur losses to re-establish computer systems and information infrastructure damaged in the cyberwar.

*Report provided by the Strategic Policy and Cyber Media Research Division of CyberSecurity Malaysia.

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