Sarawak Report ‘under attack’

KUALA LUMPUR: Sarawak Report, a website founded by investigative journalist Clare Rewcastle-Brown that has been carrying investigative expose in relation to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) fund, has suddenly found itself "under attack" in the past week.
According to the website, it has recently been subjected to a number of aggressive campaigns to force it to remove photographs of certain individuals which it had linked to alleged abuse of 1MDB funds as corroborative evidence.
"On Monday, last week, highly professional hackers intruded into the Sarawak Report website. They started their work at 10.37am and within half an hour, had deleted one of our stories and then made sure to wipe it from the trash section on our site," the website said in a post on Saturday.
"These hackers took care to disguise their IP address and then change it in a bid to hide their location."
The story that the hackers wanted removed most from the website was about the reportedly double life of Abu Dhabi's Aabar Fund chairman, Khadem al-Qubaisi.
On the one hand, he was portrayed as a sober civil servant working for the state of Abu Dhabi's sovereign fund.
But in stark contrast, Sarawak Report published images of him as a party-loving figure.
The article had focused on the fact that the fund, which has done a number of heavily criticised deals with 1MDB, had received a payment of over US$20 million (RM73.9 million) from Good Star Limited – a company controlled by millionaire Jho Low, which the website had identified as the recipient of the secret US$700 million (RM2.6 billion) "loan repayment", made supposedly to PetroSaudi from 1MDB.
Sarawak Report said it has simultaneously been faced with a different kind of attack, which was also directed at getting rid of certain images from its site.
The website said for several days now a non-existent celebrity pictures agency has pestered its internet server company to remove pictures showing Low cavorting in the south of France with Paris Hilton.
"This non-existent agency has used threatening and legalistic language, demanding we remove the pictures, which have been circulated on the web by various other online magazines since 2010, because they say they have the copyright," it said.
"So far, the non-existent picture agency has not provided proof of this copyright, nor has it shown any interest in being paid for the pictures. Instead, it has engaged in aggressive backdoor tactics to get our site and other sites to take down the pictures by threatening copyright action against our server companies," Sarawak Report said.