KUALA TERENGGANU, April 5 — The Ministry of Home Affairs (KDN) has so far received 150,000 citizenship applications, including cases of stateless children, says Minister Datuk Seri Saifuddin Nasution Ismail.

He said out of that number, KDN had processed and made decisions on whether to approve or reject 5,700 applications since January, adding that the ministry has set a target to process at least 10,000 applications this year.

He said applications were rejected when the applicants had never lived in this country, had no commitment to living here and failed to meet all the prerequisites for complete documentation.

"It means that in the consideration of the application for this citizenship issue, all the prerequisites for the documentation requirements are clearly outlined in the Federal Constitution, not just any other act, so KDN has to comply with all those conditions," he said.

He told this to reporters after the ceremony to cultivate good values and KDN Madani breaking of the fast event at the Terengganu Police Contingent Headquarters here, tonight.

In another development, Saifuddin said the authorities have yet to identify the hacker behind the cyberattack on the Immigration Department's (JIM) official website.

“Only the front page of the website was (changed)... The entire content of the website was not tampered with, other content is not affected," he said.

Yesterday, JIM confirmed that the website was hit by a cyberattack at 2am on Tuesday (April 4) by a hacker using the moniker "CaptainSmok3r".

Immigration director-general Datuk Ruslin Jusoh said the attack was in the form of a 'defacement', where the main page of the website was replaced with another image. — Bernama