Anonymous hacker collective has attacked the official website of Asia Pacific telecommunity and defaced it in protest against growing plans for internet censorship in Asia.
The hackers gained access of the website’s admin panel (running Drupal) and from there, leaked all the data stored on the website along with defacing the site with one of their own pages.
Screenshot of the deface age uploaded by Anonymous
In an exclusive conversation with one of the Anonymous hackers behind the attack, HackRead was told that:
“Though, we the Anonymous hackers have conducted this attack but we would like to mention that we were also joined by hackers from other groups, you can call it an operation conducted by World Hacker Team against censorship in Asia.”
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During recent years, many Asian countries have increased censorship following the Chinese government’s lead. Thailand has been one of the active countries, but other countries are not far away. In the last couple of months, Anonymous hacked CAT Telecom Pcl, the premier telecommunication website of Thailand and National Police server against Internet censorship.
Recently, China’s president (Xi Jinping), in a World Internet conference, emphasized on censorship being the right of every country.
In the same conference, the organization responsible for managing domain names, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) promised full support in working on the new internet plan in which Chinese officials will have stronger say on how the organization works.
ICANN will be taking over IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) which is currently run by the US government and with that move Chinese government will be able to monitor the internet all around the world. This move will certainly make internet users nervous.
Anonymous, in order to draw the attention of the people, defaced the Asian community website and left the message on the website and YouTube for people to ponder on. With that, they also leaked data like emails, usernames, and hashed passwords on the website.
Screenshot from the leaked data
Though, this will not stop ICANN or the Chinese government from progressing with their plans but it will certainly create awareness among the general public regarding the world of internet’s new order.
At the time of publishing this article, the targeted website was still hacked.
