BioThai website hacked

The website of a Thai non-governmental organisation which has advocated for Thai farmers against foreign agricultural conglomerates has been hacked and had its information stolen for the third time over the past few years.

The BioThai Foundation’s website was hacked whenever it began major campaigns against projects of foreign companies, including their efforts to register genetically-modified (GM) plants with Thai authorities or expand experiments of those plants in Thailand, said deputy manager Kingkorn Narinkul na Ayutthaya.

Webmaster Khwanchai Muenying said a person emailed him last year saying that he wanted to hack the website address at http://biothai.net, before the systems security was heightened. “This last attack was the most severe. The hacker could penetrate into our root directory, showing his high skills, and deleted or stole most of our database collected for the past five years,” he added.