In the era of Internet and the accessibility of copying and pasting things, Journalism is slowly becoming something quite shallow. It is especially true with articles that is supposedly written in depth and considered as deep “Analysis” yet the source is based purely from tweet updates. Amazing indeed and when it comes from a quite known publication one begin to wonder whatever happened to good old Journalism.

The Malaysian Insider reported that the official website of the Bangladeshi’s NGO Affairs Bureau of The Prime Minister’s office mentioned that after a bilateral talk with the Malaysian PM, it has been confirmed that Bangladeshi workers were given citizenship and voting rights in return that they will vote for the ruling government in the next election. Hence the Prime Minister (of Bangladesh) urges her countrymen to take this offer to help Bangladesh in combatting poverty. Indeed it is a very popular posting, getting 1000+ Facebook recommendations and over 144 comments but let’s take a look at the source of that news shall we.

Courtesy of MiloSuam.blogspot.com

Bangladeshi workers may easily conferred Malaysian citizenship with the condition to vote for party that represents the government in power.

Honorable Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina urges people to take this opportunity in order to lower the national poverty in line with government’s initiative and numerous measures to solve all major problems, including power and gas crises.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina also urged Malaysian entrepreneurs to invest more in Bangladesh, particularly in labor-intensive industries including readymade garment, textile, light engineering, electronics, agro-based products, ICT, power and infrastructure.

Indeed this is quite a scandal, a HUGE SCANDAL, however one do wonder why in the world would the Bangladeshi Prime Minister divulge such an important and secretive negotiation detail on an official website? What makes it’s even more ironic is the part where they mention that part of the government’s plan and initiative in combatting poverty is by having Bangladeshis getting citizenship in Malaysia, how would that combat poverty? Wouldn’t they stay in Malaysia if they were granted citizenship? And wouldn’t they bring their family to Malaysia instead of sending money back home? After all they got citizenship don’t they and surely the Malaysian Government would want to grant their spouse citizenship as well because that means one more vote.

Now before some of you begin calling us names (cybertroopers and whatnot) and accusing us of being bias of sorts, let us be clear over one thing, W//W has more than once gotten into trouble with the Government and we have several times risk trouble with the authorities as shown in our previous posts here, here and even here

Now with that being cleared let us get back to the topic. The thing is, the source for that article is taken from a page in the website, you can check out the cached page here but, yet if you look at the main page on the same day you can clearly see that the official website has been tampered…

A Malaysian Hacker with the handle m33h00n has hacked the website for the sake of Lulz I think, and as all hackers do he left his calling card there. In fact m33h00n isn’t really new to this kind of things, you can see his footprints behind various hacks on some other foreign official websites, while some for the lulz others done in the name of Patriotism such as the hack of the official website of the Indonesian Armed Forces and other Indonesian official websites as shown below

Ministry of Culture & Tourism, Republic of… by m33h00n

Now I wouldn’t want to insert any conspiracy theories in here, for it’s not W//W’s nature to get into those sort of things, but what we can clearly see is that this website has been hacked and a good technical analysis can be read here

i. Kandungan web fitnah http://www.ngoab.gov.bd/Main.php?Id=66

ii. Cuba selidik apa kandungan di :-

http://www.ngoab.gov.bd/Main.php?Id=65

http://www.ngoab.gov.bd/Main.php?Id=64

iii. Kandungan laman web hanya wujud pada http://www.ngoab.gov.bd/Main.php?Id=63

3. Kalau di lihat dari pattern posting mesti lah berterusan dari Id=1 …. hingga Id=66 , tidak ada ruang2 kosong diantaranya . Tetapi pada Id=65 dan Id=64 , tidak ada apa2 isi kandungan (pada hari entry ini di’post’) . Iaitu terdapat unsur-unsur laman web ini telah di ‘hijak’

4. Press statement original dari Bangladesh online newspaper , http://www.weeklyblitz.net/744/outcome-of-bangladeshi-pms-trip :-

Taken from – bidaman.blogspot.com

Now I don’t know what’s the purpose behind this move but we suspect the reasoning behind this hack, as if the same with all other hacks is simply done for the sake of Lulz and guess what The Malaysian Insider has just been burned pretty badly we say.

Now, if this was reported by some small time fringe blogs like say W//W, then no issue. But this story was picked up by The Malaysian Insider, a supposedly professional journalism portal with Editorials and whatnot and with something that is so obvious, one may wonder don’t they ever do any fact checking or even, well confer with any tech specialist on the source of this “news”, we really liked the part where they mention a Royal Commission of Inquiry for this, RCI for a spoof, is quite funny.

And as this article is being written all that is reported by TMI so far regarding this issue is DPM rubbishes Bangladeshi votes-for-citizenship claim , but of course, by the looks of it, there may be more updates coming soon.