PRIME Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha ha

PRIME Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha has instructed relevant state agencies to tighten security in the government computer system and websites after a group of international hackers issued a threat on Thursday, Information and Communication Technology Minister Uttama Savanayana said.

Uttama tweeted yesterday that Prayut had told him and other agencies under his ministry to coordinate with relevant bodies to protect the government's information and services from hackers.

"I reported the hacking moves [on Thursday evening] to the PM and he told me to keep a close watch on those who have bad intentions," the minister said.

Uttama also called on people and businesses to keep their data safe and back it up regularly. He also denied that this threat had anything to do with the "cyber-army" unit set up by the military. The Army announced last week that it was establishing a cyber-army unit for security reasons.

Meanwhile, Deputy PM and Defence Minister General Prawit Wongsuwan said yesterday that the ICT Ministry was looking into this hacking threat and that the military was also "doing its part" in dealing with the issue. He did not elaborate.

On Thursday, Anonymous - an international group of activists and hackers promoting Internet freedom - announced that it was targeting the Thai government in what it called "Operation Single Gateway". Two Twitter accounts @anonymouseasia and @LatestAnonNews tweeted a statement on their planned activities to ##OpSingleGateway under the hashtag #Anonymous. The full statement is available on http://pastebin.com/SL0ZaMxT.

Later, F5CyberArmy (@f5cyberarmy)tweeted that CAT had compromised thousands of customers' log-ins, passwords, IDs and more, and posted a screenshot of some data.

Colonel Sanpachai Huvanandana, acting chief executive of CAT Telecom, said the screenshot displaying details of CAT clients was not real and no data had leaked from the CAT system.

Investigation showed that CAT had been hacked about 80 times via its MY Service system used by dealers. However, CAT insists there was no such hacking, and if information was leaked, dealers working under MY Service would automatically have recorded the leakage. Also, hackers do not have access to other database systems, it said.

He also added that CAT Telecom and the ICT Ministry were not planning to set up a single gateway - it is a misunderstanding, he said.

In fact, he said, the government was planning to woo world content providers to set up bases in Thailand, so the country could become an Asean digital hub.

The threat of the attack came after CAT allegedly handed in a proposal to set up a national Internet gateway to the ICT Ministry. Sanpachai, however, insists that it is not a gateway, but more a collaboration between the government and the private sector.

Traffic jam

Sanpachai added that on Thursday evening, there was twice the usual amount of "access-request" traffic to the CAT website, which was unusual during the evening and especially before a holiday. This sort of attack is called DDoS (distributed denial of service), where several compromised systems, often infected with a Trojan, are used to target a single system.

Sanpachai added that CAT complied with international standards like other operators, and was prepared for any kind of attack. It is also monitoring the system real-time, and is ready to step in once there is an unusual amount of traffic or packages, he added.

"We firmly insist that officials are monitoring the system and the backoffice systems are turned off during this holiday period," he said.

He added that though some CAT customers had voiced concern over the security of their data, they had been assured that the agency followed international security standards.

Admitting that information about the attack has had a negative impact on CAT, Sanpachai insisted that the agency was prepared for the attacks.