Thai government websites dropped offline this week in what was either a politically motivated distributed denial-of-service attack or a case of badly designed websites falling over in response to an unusual increase in visitor numbers.
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The first websites went offline at about 10pm Wednesday, after the “Anti-CAT Tower Mob” group called on its 127,000-plus Facebook fans to attack, even amid threats from the government that such actions would be treated as violations of the Computer Crime Act.
“There were several other authorities websites which faced similar issues”, he explained, including access to the sites was restored via this morning.
Thailand is planning to establish a single government-controlled gateway as a tool to further control access to “inappropriate websites and information flows from other countries”.
The Pheu Thai Party, Thailand’s majority coalition party, has argued that a single internet gateway will do more harm than good, the Bangkok Post reported.
Targets included the ministry of information, communications and technology (ICT) and the main Thai government portal at thaigov.go.th, the BBC reports.
DDOS attacks can be caused by a huge number of Internet users or special programs simultaneously sending requests to a website until it exceeds its capacity to handle the Internet traffic. “We tend not to believe they planned to assault government sites”, he told reporters in Bangkok.
“We will not interfere in the use of Internet or social media”, he said.
By Thursday afternoon more than 132,000 people had signed a petition on Change.org calling on the government to abandon the proposal, while the state websites that had crashed appeared to be running but more slowly than usual.
Pawoot Pongvitayapanu, president of the Thai e-commerce Association, has opposed the single gateway because it will slow the internet and decrease e-business transactions.
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The cabinet under Gen Prayut Chan-o-cha, the junta leader and Prime Minister, last month gave the green light to the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (MICT) and relevant agencies to push ahead with the process to implement a single gateway internet system before the end of the 2015 budget year.
