Websites Hacked of Cambodian Secret Political Police and Supreme Court Charged with Both Protecting the Assassins of Political Opponents and Jailing Opposition
Two Cambodian government ministries web sites were hacked this week and defaced in the latest in series of cyber attacks against the authorities.
The National Military Police and Supreme Court Web sites were breached and defaced by separate hacker and hacker group on Tuesday, with visitors to the Web site of the National Military Police on Tuesday greeted by a picture of a masked man wearing a red cape. Above his head, there was a word printed in capitals: “Hacked”.
If you logged on to the Supreme Court site you would have been met by a message in the top left hand corner, “hacked by Hmei7”, the signature of an Indonesian hacker, who claimed to have attacked 70,000 Web sites worldwide.
This means in the last year since 2012, hackers have breached the Web sites of at least 7 major government ministries, including the National Police, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Industry, Mines and Energy, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Hacktivist group Anonymous breached Cambodia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and stole 5,000 documents which included people’s passport information and visa requests from the hard drives as revenge for the arrest and deportation of Swede Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, co-founder of file sharing Web site, The Pirate Bay, who had taken refuge in the country after fleeing Sweden after being convicted of illegally sharing proprietary information from the internet.
The National Military Police are the Cambodian Government’s specially trained political police, tasked with cracking down on political opponents to dictator Hun Sen, and are documented to be involved in widespread organized crime, including kidnapping and murder for ransom, prostitution, and torture and killing of political opponents.
The Supreme Court stands accused as being entirely politically controlled by Hun Sen and his small cabal of corrupt elite, who have sentenced numerous journalists, elected parliamentarians, social, land, and environmental activists to prison sentences while protecting those guilty of murdering other activists and journalists from facing legal sanction.
Phu Leewood, former secretary-general of the government’s National Information Communications Technology Development Authority, noted the government does not have the skills and education and the security of government Web sites will “take time”, he told the Cambodian Daily.
After the government’s first recorded cyberattack in 2002, all Web sites were hosted from the same server with a frequently updated firewall, but since 2010, each ministry has been responsible for its own online security and every Web site has its own server, most with no firewalls, because government employees do not know how to use it, Leewood explained.
