Thai-Cambodian cyberwarriors battle on despite truce

AFP :

Thailand and Cambodia may have reached a ceasefire to halt their bloody border clashes, but cyber warriors are still battling online, daubing official websites with obscenities, deluging opponents with spam and taking pages down.

The five-day conflict left more than 40 people dead and drove more than 300,000 from their homes.

It also kicked off a disinformation blitz as Thai and Cambodian partisans alike sought to boost the narrative that the other was to blame.

Thai officials recorded more than 500 million instances of online attacks in recent days, government spokesperson Jirayu Huangsab said on Wednesday.

These included spamming reports to online platforms and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks — halting access to a website by overloading its servers with traffic.

“It’s a psychological war,” Cambodian government spokesman Pen Bona told AFP.

“There’s a lot of fake news and it wouldn’t be strange if it came from social media users, but even official Thai media outlets themselves publish a lot of fake news.”