KARACHI: Cyber domains in Pakistan, especially official sites of the government have been exposed to a grave threat of hacking as majority of the Internet users are enjoying the service of YouTube by using proxy sites.
It was learnt that the ban on YouTube was almost absent as majority of Internet users in Pakistan were enjoying the service by using proxy sites and unblocking software. It is to be noted that the world’s prime video sharing website YouTube had been blocked in Pakistan since September 27, 2012 after anti-Islamic videos had gone viral on the site.
But, about half of the Internet users in country have found ways to unblock YouTube and other thousands of blocked porn sites which had also been blocked by the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) last year, through proxy sites, which has created another danger and that is of triggering ‘Trojan Horse’ — a non-self-replicating type of malware. Information technology (IT) experts termed the increasing practice of the use of proxy sites a grave threat to the Pakistani cyber world because ‘Trojan Horse’ may give the hacker remote access to a targeted computer system.
“Hackers may take control of important official websites of government organisations, which are clear from numerous attacks of Indian hackers on the website of the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). So it is prudent on the part of the government to lift the ban on YouTube in order to avoid this malware,” said an expert yesterday.
He said it was beyond comprehension why YouTube is blocked in Pakistan when it doesn’t have any kind of restrictions in Saudi Arabia and other Islamic states. Earlier, Internet users were using Google’s cache feature to view blocked websites but this feature now seems to be under some level of blocking as access is now erratic and does not work for blocked websites.
So, the new way out is to use proxy servers outside the firewall, which is not difficult to do. Another most popular mode is downloading softwares like Spot Flux and Hot Spot Shield, which give more satisfactory results than proxy sites.
“It’s quite easy to by-pass proxy servers. Just type proxy on Google, all the results will lead you to websites which will bypass the restrictions implemented by PTA,” he added. “Though the performance of proxy softwares is not pretty good because they slow down the Internet but if one has a connection of more than 1MB speed then he or she can easily enjoy smooth streaming,” he added.
Internews
