Cyber warring

As many readers will be aware, there’s been a bit of a war going on between the military junta and cyber activists. This follows the puppet National Legislative Assembly having given the junta its upgraded Computer Crimes Act, making repression easier than ever.

When the law was passed, numerous hackers got to work on government web sites. The junta responded with arrests of alleged culprits.

Disruptive.Asia “covers the current state of digital disruption in the Asia-Pacific telecommunications industry – where it’s coming from, what’s driving it, the impact it’s having on the industry, how telecoms players are responding and what’s next.” We thank a reader for directing us to this this Disruptive.Asia story from a few days ago on the war between the junta and its anonymous cyber enemies.

It says that the “new year break has been a bruising one for the Thai government, with members of the Anonymous collective attacking many Thai government websites in retaliation to its passage of the controversial computer crime law under the hashtag #opsinglegateway, which refers to the mass surveillance program that the Thai government still seems eager to push forward.”

This junta’s “security officials dismissed the Anonymous hackers as amateurs who could only deface websites, and that no databases had been compromised.” A day later, in a controversial retaliatory attack, “the Thai consulate website in Los Angeles was not only hacked and defaced, but personal information of what was claimed to be people applying for Thailand visas was doxxed or leaked.” One of those leaked was junta spokesperson Lt. Gen. Sansern Kaewkumnerd.

Sansern’s remarkably silly response was to reaffirm “that no government agency had been hacked and said that everyone was watching too many Hollywood hacking movies.” The police reckoned nothing had been hacked and said that the kids they arrested were probably in the pay of “them.” (We take this to mean the Thaksinistas but consider it a ludicrous claim.)

The article claims multiple hacks:

[The] Ministry of Foreign Affairs also had a database with personal data (seemingly of employees) doxxed and dumped on the dark web. Websites for the ministries of Tourism, Defence and ICT (Now Digital Economy), as well as the National Statistical Office, Army Veteran Affairs, Navy and numerous local administration and police websites were also at one point or another, taken down or defaced by the hacking collective in the past week.

The debate on all of this in the social mediascape is now about Anonymous “providing” the junta with excuses for crackdowns and yellow-shirted calls for greater securtity versus those who applaud the group’s ability to show how lame the junta’s cyber security is.