SayaKenaHack.com to be taken down tomorrow

PETALING JAYA: The creator of SayaKenaHack.com will be taking down the website tomorrow.

In a blog post on Thursday, IT expert Keith Rozario said he had “a script scheduled to run at midnight on Sunday to tear down the database”.

“So if you wanna check, you better do it now, cause in three days time, it’ll be gone,” he wrote.

Rozario, who is based in Singapore, said he was afraid that the next time he lands in Malaysia, he might “end up in handcuffs at the back of a police car”.

“But sometimes, you gotta do what’s right, and not just what’s ‘legally permissible’,” he said.

Rozario said he believes that peo ple have the right to know if their personal data is being leaked online, even if they are not able to do anything about it.

“You might choose to ‘not know’, but that is a right you can choose to exercise. No one should be allowed to withhold that information from you.

“If you have terminal untreatable cancer – does that mean a doctor shouldn’t tell you about it? If you’re on a plane that’s about to crash, should the pilot remain silent?

“You have a right to know about the leak. Regardless of whether you can do anything about it,” he wrote.

Rozario claimed banning the website is akin to saying that only “geeks and hackers” can access the data, but not “average joes”.

“This data is freely available for anyone to download. The only people with the skills to find it, though, are people we generally refer to as ‘geeks’ or ‘hackers’.

“This is elitism, and it’s wrong,” he said.

Rozario claimed that when technology news portal lowyat.net published an article about SayaKenaHack, there were about 200 concurrent users checking the site at any one time.

“When The Star published the article in the morning, the site did 2000+ concurrent users (10 times more!)” he wrote.

As of 5pm yesterday, more than 150,000 people had checked the site.

Rozario also clarified that he had “no way” of retrieving the full phone numbers from the database.

The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) blocked SayaKenaHack. com on Thursday, following an application from the Personal Data Protection Department under Section 130 of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 for unlawful collection of personal data.

The Star has run a series of articles on a data breach that affected some 46.2 million mobile phone subscribers.

On Thursday, it highlighted the discovery of another breach within the major breach, when Malaysians who logged in to SayaKenaHack. com found that unknown mobile phone numbers were registered under their MyKad numbers.

You have a right to know about the leak. Regardless of whether you can do anything about it.

Keith Rozario