Computers and servers all WIPED At 1MDB

By admin-s Last updated Feb 13, 2015

Concerned staff at 1MDB have confided that all computers and records at the troubled fund were recently called in and wiped. They say this includes not only personal computers belonging to staff but also the mainframe servers as well!

Sarawak Report

The order came as a surprise move by management, according to sources and it happened just before Christmas. Staff were contacted directly by phone or in person and told to take their computers immediately to the IT section in order to be wiped.

The Tun Razak Exchange is one of 1MDB’s key projects.

None of the instructions were delivered by text or email, leaving little record of the blitz, which took place in the space of just a few hours.

The result is that there are few records left available to show what has been going on at the beleaguered fund and this is widely believed amongst staff to be the reason.

The excuse was they had ‘been hacked’

The excuse given to bewildered staff members was that there had been a systems hack. One of them sent out this message on the day it happened, which was Friday 19th of December, a fortnight before the departure of the previous CEO Mohd Hazem Abdul Rahman:

“1MDB has been collecting employee laptops and company-issued handphones today. Staff were contacted in person or by phone call and informed to hand them in to IT. No emails or text messages were sent. On asking the reason for the hand-in staff were advised that there has been a hacking attempt and that therefore the company is collecting all laptops and handphones in order to wipe them (wipe the discs clean) before they are returned. Parallel to that the main servers are being wiped. If you try to email a 1MDB employee now the email will bounce back as undeliverable. Obviously the reason given is incredulous to say the least”

Experts have told Sarawak report that the excuse of a hacking attempt is indeed rarely a credible reason for wiping information from servers:

It makes absolutely no sense to wipe servers to protect against hacking or online attacks. Instead you would either take these severs offline altogether until the issue was resolved or step up security. When Sony was hacked recently they didn’t wipe all their servers.

This snap decision to expunge all past records and emails from all staff computers and handheld devices as well as the organisations mainframe computers will inevitably raise questions about whether management were trying to conceal potentially embarrassing information before the handover.

Numerous questions have been asked for several months from all quarters about the hundreds of missing millions from the fund, which were raised from public borrowing.

Everything Wiped – what were they trying to hide?

There have been few proper answers forth-coming from 1MDB and now it appears there may be no evidence to be had either!

Were outgoing team deliberately covering up evidence and if so what, people are inevitably left wondering?

Just in September, Sarawak Report, for example, had disclosed that it has been given access to emails, which indicated the extent of the involvement of tycoon Jho Low in 1MDB’s decision-making processes. Was this the reason for the attempt to wipe anything that could corroborate such information from 1MDB?

An emailed directive was later sent out to all staff confirming the situation that all data pre-19DEC2014 is no longer retrievable. “It is an internal email” one staff member told Sarawak Report. “It says that as part of the wipe all 1MDB HQ emails have been re-configured. All emails prior to 19DEC14 are permanently wiped”.