SHAH ALAM - Cyberattacks have attracted increasing attention on social media recently, but they are neither a new issue nor an emerging threat, having long been part of the global digital security landscape.
Pendakwah Teknologi Solutions founder Adil Hidayat Rosli said cyberattacks and system intrusions had been happening long before the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and applications such as ChatGPT.
He said claims that Malaysia had become the country facing the most cyberattacks within 24 hours, prompting local hacker groups to launch retaliatory attacks, should not be accepted without credible evidence.
The cybersecurity, automation and AI expert said the public needed to understand the difference between threat detection activities, blocked attack attempts and actual incidents involving successful system breaches.
"Not every security alert means a system has been successfully hacked. Some involve automated scanning, attack attempts blocked by firewalls and suspicious traffic being detected. All these activities must be analysed first before they can be considered successful intrusions.
"The current situation should not be directly compared with the major cyberattack against Estonia in 2007 without evidence of the scale of the attacks, duration of disruption and impact on critical services.
"The public should certainly be aware of cybersecurity. However, they should not get carried away with sharing information to the extent of treating every line on a dashboard as a retaliatory attack," he told Sinar.
Adil also clarified that lines and animations on cyber threat dashboards, including those displayed by platforms such as Fortinet, could not be taken as evidence that Malaysian hackers were launching retaliatory attacks against other countries.
He said such dashboards merely provided visual representations of threat activity based on specific detection data.
He added that these displays did not, on their own, confirm the attacker's identity, the actual target or whether an attack had been successful.
"Do not treat cyberattacks like a game of Counter-Strike, where stories emerge claiming that Malaysian hackers are launching retaliatory attacks. Hackers are not there to help defend Malaysia.
"Cyber operations are not as simple as they are portrayed on social media and any claims must be supported by technical evidence," he said.
He also commented on slogans such as 'Pray for Malaysian Hackers', which portrayed hacker groups as national defence heroes, when the work of protecting digital systems involved many professionals who rarely received public attention.
According to Adil, those who also deserved recognition included information technology (IT) professionals, cybersecurity experts, programmers, software developers, system administrators, network engineers and security incident response teams.
He added that their responsibilities included developing secure applications, reviewing and fixing code, installing security patches, strengthening server configurations, monitoring networks, identifying system vulnerabilities and restoring services following disruptions.
However, Adil also acknowledged the contributions of ethical hackers and penetration testers who carried out authorised security testing with the permission of organisations.