Rafizi assures public of Padu’s security, says repelled on average two million attempted hacks each week

KUALA LUMPUR, March 11 — The government has managed to prevent over two million attempts to hack the Pangkalan Data Utama (Padu) or Central Database Hub, in each week, Economy Minister Rafizi Ramli said.

He said these attempted attacks happened since Padu was launched on January 2.

“Padu is still safe, as a result of the government’s fast action taken by the team who built Padu. When pro-rated, there are between 2 to 2.3 million attempted attacks each week,” Rafizi told the Parliament in his winding up of the debate on the King’s speech here.

“The first type of attack came in the form of Anti-Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), whereby there were 28 attempts from January 2 to January 3 — in the first two days of the launch.

“Since after January 4, there has been no DDoS attempted attacks to date,” he added.

Another form of attack was prevented through the Intrusion Prevention System, whereby he said 32.86 million attacks were recorded from January to March 4.

“All of these attacks were blocked. The type of interception we used was the firewall, whereby over three million interceptions were made since January 2,” he said.

Rafizi further assured the Parliament that the government’s decision to utilise geofencing was since the planning stages of Padu, whereby only Padu can only be updated domestically, those outside of the country are not allowed.

“If you look at it, we knew that if we don’t do geofencing, we are opening Padu to global attack because even when we didn’t open Padu, there have been attacks.

“As of now, Padu’s security system is sufficient and strong. The team who is working to ensure every attack is stopped is working 18 to 20 hours, seven days a week, while we are debating here they are continuously carrying out their responsibility,” he said.

On February 20, technology news site SoyaCincau reported that international hacker group R00TK1T claimed to have hacked a “Padu organisation”.

The “Padu organisation” however is not the Central Database Hub, but was instead the National Population and Family Development Board’s Management and Service Delivery Unit, which carries the same acronym.