Hackers associated with the Anonymous collective have knocked offline nearly 300 Thai court and government websites in retaliation for death sentences handed down to two Myanmar men for murdering a pair of British tourists on Koh Tao.
In a Facebook post to a non-official Anonymous page, the hackers, believed to be the same Myanmar group that defaced Royal Thai Police websites on Jan 5, said they had shut down “all Thai Court of Justice websites in protest over the #KohTao murder verdict.”
“Anonymous is supporting the campaign to ask tourists to boycott Thailand ‘until such time changes are made with the way Thai police handle investigations involving foreign tourists’,” the post read.
The post included the graphic bearing the name “Blink Hackers Group” that replaced the home pages of a reported 13 Thai police websites earlier this month, along with a Thai flag emblazoned with a hand giving a middle-finger gesture.
The group also listed the 294 websites attacked. Random checks of those on the list all resulted in failures to connect as of this afternoon (Jan 13).
The list of sites includes every Court of Justice website, plus the Chiang Mai Tourist Rights Protection website.
The Blink Hackers Group have taken the front-line position online in wide-ranging protests in Myanmar over the Christmas Eve sentencing of Zaw Lin and Wyn Zaw Htun for the September 2014 rape and murder of Hannah Witheridge and murder of David Miller.
Critics of the judgement claim the 22-year-old men were tortured by police and forced to confess to a crime they did not commit, then were railroaded in a botched investigation using questionable DNA evidence.