Members of the Anonymous hacker collective have defaced the Asia Pacific Telecommunity website (apt.int), have gained access to the site's admin panel (running Drupal), and have also managed to get their hands on a database dump.

Many Asian countries are slowly advancing plans to set up Internet monitoring systems, similar to the ones used by the Chinese government. The most active of them all is Thailand, but others are also doing the same thing.

Quite recently, China's President, Xi Jinping, held a speech at the second World Internet Conference, where he invoked his country's right to censor the Internet inside its borders, a right that every other country should exert as well.

Anonymous is protesting against the growing trend of Internet censorship in Asia

Even worse, at the same conference, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the organization that is in charge of managing domain names, has also pledged their support for a new plan for running the Internet, where Chinese figures have a more powerful word in the decisions taken by the organization.

Since next year, ICANN will take over more IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) functions from the US government. This would give the Chinese government more power in how the global Internet is managed, which not many people should look forward to if we look at how the Internet is run inside their own borders.

As a way to draw attention to the growing trend of censoring access to the Internet in Asian countries, Anonymous hackers did the only thing they could, and that was to leave simple messages behind, reminding people of the bigger picture.

Besides the simplistic message put down on the apt.int/Anonymous page, the group also left behind a link to a YouTube video and dumped the site's database that includes details such as emails, usernames, and hashed password strings. This won't hinder China's and ICANN's plans, but it will draw some attention from both users living in Asian countries and those living in Western states.