So after the furore over the Malaysian Insider article that wrongly accused the Government of using spyware on its citizens, the MCMC rightly issued a press statement denouncing the article.
Unfortunately, even the MCMC has to do some reading up a bit before it post up press releases. According to the MCMC press release which you can read in it’s entirety here:
MCMC has also conducted a review of currently available information and we have found that the server that is allegedly hosted in Malaysia also has similar Internet Protocol (IP) addresses linked to a commercial webhosting company called GPLHost which has similar IP hosting in Australia, Singapore and the United States. We have also found that the server that is claimed to be in Malaysia appears to be registered to a company called Iusacell PCS. Further checking of Iusacell PCS indicates that it could be a Mexican mobile operator.
Unfortunately, this was due to mis-print on the original CitizenLab report, where they wrongly attributed the Mexican Mobile operator as the owner of the Malaysian servers. They corrected the error on the 15th of March stating:
Corrections (15 March 2013):
* The table of FinFisher server IP addresses has been revised since the original publication. Due to an issue during formatting, Ethio Telecom was incorrectly identified as being in Estonia rather than in Ethiopia and Iusacell PCS was incorrectly identified as being in Malaysia rather than in Mexico. The IP range 117.121.xxx.xxx corresponds with GPLHost, which is located in Malaysia. Iusacell PCS corresponds with 187.188.xxx.xxx and is located in Mexico.
This was quite a rookie error, it’s actually quite simple to reverse lookup an IP address and determine which company owns a specific IP domain. In fact, there’s a whole bunch of websites online that offer the service for free–and the MCMC have the gaul to say “We have also found that the server that is claimed to be in Malaysia appears to be registered to a company called Iusacell PCS.”
No you did not FIND anything–you just read it online!! The fact that the MCMC itself can’t tell that a statement in their press release is contradicts itself from a technical perspective is both worrying and upsetting–but mostly upsetting. How can a local regulatory body mess up such a basic fact-check. To simply blame Iusacell PCS is as irresponsible as reporting Malaysia uses spyware.