Raja Petra's 'Malaysia Today' hacked

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Malaysia Today was hacked this morning and the poor Internet connection affecting several areas in Malaysia has affected efforts to restore the website.

Website’s owner Raja Petra Kamarudin said efforts to have the site back up have been futile because he was having problem reaching the servers based in Singapore due unstable connections provided by broadband service provider Streamyx.

"We are working on it. I don’t know what happened. We have now shut the system down and we’re trying to back up the database.

"The problem is that the line is very bad and the line gets cut off before the database is fully backed up. So we have to keep doing it all over again," he told Malaysiakini.

In the hacking, the website’s main page - which normally displays news and blog articles - had been replaced by the text, ‘hai!!! this web hacked by GasakdotNet’.

An image of former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad in an army helmet with the words ‘We Were Soldiers’ were prominently displayed.

The display is an art rework of a poster of a war movie starring Mel Gibson.

According to Raja Petra, the multiple efforts in restoring the files from their servers hosted in Singapore was not working either.

"The repeated downloading is causing our database to get corrupted. I was told by reliable sources that Streamyx has capped the connectivity from Malaysia to Singapore," he said.

Unstable connection lately

The outspoken blogger (photo) said recovery efforts started immediately as soon as his controversial website was hacked early this morning.

"We’ve been trying to get the site back up since 10, 11 this morning. It is not down because of the hacking. It’s because of the weak connection.

"We get hacked all the time but we would normally be able to put the website back up quickly.’

‘I am sure there are people paid full-time to hack my website," he then quipped.

"The site would be back up by now if the connection was better. I was told it could have been done within two hours but it has been seven hours and we can’t do a single thing," he added.

He also noted that he was unsure when ‘Malaysia Today’ will be back up but they will continue trying.

Streamyx’s connection has been unstable in the past week with several IP (internet protocol) addresses having restricted and limited connectivity.