Two Anonymous hackers in Cambodia have escaped further jail time by joining forces with the government to provide their IT skills to agencies.
By Jonathan Keane | 12 October 2014 at 6:00 am CET
Two Anonymous hackers in Cambodia have escaped further jail time by joining forces with the government to provide their IT skills to agencies.
The hackers, King “Black Cyber” Mongkolpanha and Chou “Zoro” Songheng, aged 21 and 20 respectively, hacked up to 30 Cambodian government websites as part of Anonymous’ “Operation Cambodia Freedom” in response to disputed elections in the country.
Black Cyber and Zoro had already served five months in prison after being found guilty of IT offences but a judge in Phnom Penh has ruled that the two will use their “excellent” IT skills in work for the government to mitigate threats. They will be under supervision for two years.
“Because they were IT students and have excellent knowledge in IT, the court has decided to allow them to begin work as IT police officers with the Internal Security Department of the Ministry of Interior in order to help police work in combating information technology crimes,” said judge Ros Piseth.
“I am very pleased that the court has given me a chance to rehabilitate and work with police,” Black Cyber told the Phnom Penh Post.
The new job offers are believed to help the government handle cyber threats but not everyone is convinced.
One Cambodian cybersecurity specialist said the hacking work that the two exhibited was not exceptional and their skills may not make a huge difference.
“The [distributed denial of service attack] that they performed was not impressive in any way and does not demonstrate ‘excellent skills’, as the police put it,” he says.
“Equally, Anonymous Cambodia did not understand the basic principles of internet anonymity. They were committing crimes directly from their own networks registered to them in their own names, and they were communicating with journalists using American services with no protection. Judging by their demonstrated recklessness, they did not understand what they were doing and how they would be discovered.”
“It’s a very strange decision for me, and it’s the discretion of judges to make such a decision,” added Duch Piseth, head of trial monitoring at the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “But I don’t think the convicted person will appeal against this decision – they are free and they have a good position in the government.”