Malaysian immigration website was hit by cybersecurity attack, confirms immigration director-general

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Malaysia's immigration website has been hacked yet again, as confirmed by immigration director-general Datuk Ruslin Jusoh at a press conference this week. Jusoh said that the website was hacked at 2am on April 4 by a hacker who goes by the name “CaptainSmok3r".

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hacking

He stated that the cyberattack was in the form of a ‘defacement’, where the main page of the Immigration Department website was replaced with another image. That was the extent of the attack as the actual links embedded within the websites remained unaffected.

In response to the attack, Jusoh went on to add that they shut the immigration page down to prevent access while the website was being repaired and reconfigured.

When the website was initially hacked, the Malaysian Immigration Department took to Facebook to update users to say that the website was "temporarily under maintenance".

msia immigration

This is not the first time the Malaysian government agency has been hacked. In January this year, a hacker group by the name of Dark Pink used phishing emails and advanced malware to compromise the defences of many countries’ military branches and one of those countries was Malaysia. In response to this, the Malaysian Armed Forces said that their activities were fortunately detected early and curbed by preventive measures.

Scamming and hacking seem to be on the rise in Malaysia as of late. Communications and digital minister Fahmi Fadzil has been on the ball by communicating with social media platforms to enhance their protection measures to better protect user safety. For instance, most recently, Fahmi has been in talks with Telegram to rectify the slew of scams that users were experiencing.

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