Hackers deface Indonesian president’s website

Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) has come under cyber attack after hackers defaced the homepage of his website for several hours, apparently in protest at growing corruption and wealth inequality in the country.

The website is now back to normal but those responsible have posted an image of the defacement here.

The image indicates that a hacker dubbed MJL007 from a group known as the Jember Hacker Team was responsible for the incident. The only message reads: “This is a PayBack From Jember Hacker Team”.

JHT told local news site Merdeka that it carried out the attack because of increasing anger at the current administration.

"Corruption is rampant, the poor are everywhere. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer," a representative from the group told the site (after translation from Google), hinting that there may be more cyber-related protests in the future.

Indonesian communications and information minister, Tifatul Sembiring, told news site Detik that the perpetrators managed to change the site’s homepage by redirecting the IP address, which corresponds to one tended at hosting firm SoftLayer’s Texas data centre.

The Minister added that plans were being discussed to create a back-up server in another country to mitigate the risk of a similar attack in the future.

The government is apparently working with law enforcement teams to examine log files in a bid to trace the origin of the attack. That may not prove an onerous task: a quick bit of Googling here at Vulture South yielded the existence of jember-hacker.org, which was operational at the time of writing. ®