Group warns of wave of cyber attacks if single gateway plan is not abandoned

They demanded that the plan be scrapped before midnight on October 14 or the government would face “an unprecedented level of cyber-attacks”.

The group, which calls itself “Citizens against Single Gateway”, reportedly crashed websites of the Information and Communications Ministry and some other state agencies with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks last week.

The group issued a statement online late on Friday night, demanding that the Cabinet issue a resolution or the prime minister gives an order formally cancelling the single gateway plan by 11.30pm October 14.

“If the deadline passes without the government changing its stance, the Citizens against the single gateway will use severe measures to retaliate against the government without announcing the targets in advance,” the statement said.

On Wednesday, the group circulated online calls for angry netizens to simultaneously mount DDoS attacks on the ICT website at 10pm but the website was brought down apparently with an overwhelming number of packets of requests by 7pm before it was restored only at 1am on Thursday.

 

‘Extreme measure’

The group said in the statement it would minimise impact on the public but it sought understanding from the public as collateral damage was unavoidable in the fight against efforts to “establish a dictatorial state in all spaces, including the cyberspace”.

The group said in the statement that its measures were aimed at sending a strong and clear message to the government that the administration would fail to control the people’s communications effectively.

It said the group has already contemplated the consequences of its retaliatory measures against the government but “in time of war, losses will be unavoidable”.

Meanwhile, Pongsuk Hiranprueck, an information technology expert and entrepreneur, said yesterday he disagreed with the plan to combine the country’s Internet connections with the worldwide web into a single channel. He added that this was the case in the past when Thailand had only a single gateway and severe Internet bottlenecks.

He warned that the government would need to spend a lot of money investing in the single gateway plan, as he did not think that private Internet service providers would want to join. “The ISPs have already invested a lot in their own gateway,” he said.

“The push for a single gateway seems to be an extreme measure. It leads to reduced freedom in using the Internet, which is supposed to be free,” Pongsuk said. 

However, Pongsuk agreed with the government’s intention to curb hate speech and insults toward the country’s highly revered institution on the Internet.

Pongsuk suggested that in order to access the Internet, registration should be required with the use of the 13-digit citizen identification number. He said tough checks should be conducted to ensure that people who posted messages on the Internet were actually the ones who register.

“You may use false names to post messages, but your ID number reveals your identity,” he said.