Malaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim was sworn in as prime minister on Thursday, capping a three-decade political journey from a protege of veteran leader Mahathir Mohamad to protest leader, a prisoner convicted of sodomy and opposition leader.

His appointment ends five days of unprecedented post-election crisis, but could usher in a new instability with his rival, former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin, challenging him to prove his majority in parliament.

Both men failed to win a majority in a Saturday election, but the constitutional monarch, King Al-Sultan Abdullah, appointed Anwar after speaking to several lawmakers.

Anwar takes over at a challenging time: the economy is slowing and the country is divided after a tight election that pitted Anwar’s progressive coalition against Muhyiddin’s mostly conservative ethnic-Malay, Muslim alliance.

Markets surged upon the end of the political deadlock. The ringgit currency posted its best day in two weeks and equities (.KLSE) rose 3%.

The 75-year-old Anwar has time and again been denied the premiership despite getting within striking distance over the years: he was deputy prime minister in the 1990s and the official prime minister-in-waiting in 2018.

In between, he spent nearly a decade in jail for sodomy and corruption in what he says were politically motivated charges aimed at ending his career.

The uncertainty over the election threatened to prolong political instability in the Southeast Asian country, which has had three prime ministers in as many years, and risks delaying policy decisions needed to foster economic recovery.

Anwar’s supporters expressed hope that his government would head off a return to historic tension between the ethnic Malay, Muslim majority and ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities.

“All we want is moderation for Malaysia and Anwar represents that,” said a communications manager in Kuala Lumpur, who asked to be identified by her surname Tang.

“We can’t have a country that is divided by race and religion as that will set us back another 10 years.”

Anwar told Reuters in an interview before the election that he would seek “to emphasize governance and anti-corruption, and rid this country of racism and religious bigotry” if appointed premier.

His coalition, known as Pakatan Harapan, won the most seats in Saturday’s vote with 82, while Muhyiddin’s Perikatan Nasional bloc won 73. They needed 112 – a simple majority – to form a government.

The long-ruling Barisan bloc won only 30 seats – the worst electoral performance for a coalition that had dominated politics since independence in 1957.

Barisan said on Thursday it would not support a government led by Muhyiddin, though it did not make any reference to Anwar.

Muhyiddin, after Anwar’s appointment, asked Anwar to prove his majority in parliament.

Muhyiddin’s bloc includes the Islamist party PAS, whose electoral gains raised concern among members of the ethnic Chinese and ethnic Indian communities, most of whom follow other faiths.

Authorities warned after the weekend vote of a rise in ethnic tension on social media and short video platform TikTok said it was on high alert for content that violated its guidelines.

Social media users reported numerous TikTok posts since the election that mentioned a riot in the capital, Kuala Lumpur, on May 13, 1969, in which about 200 people were killed, days after opposition parties supported by ethnic Chinese voters made inroads in an election.

Police told social media users to refrain from “provocative” posts and said they were setting up 24-hour check-points on roads throughout the country to ensure public peace and safety.

The decision on the prime minister came down to King Al-Sultan Abdullah, after both Anwar and Muhyiddin missed his Tuesday afternoon deadline to put together a ruling alliance.

The constitutional monarch plays a largely ceremonial role but can appoint a premier he believes will command a majority in parliament.

Malaysia has a unique constitutional monarchy in which kings are chosen in turn from the royal families of nine states to reign for a five-year term.

As premier, Anwar will have to address soaring inflation and slowing growth as the economy recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, while calming ethnic tensions.

The most immediate issue will be the budget for next year, which was tabled before the election was called but has yet to be passed.

Anwar will also have to negotiate agreements with lawmakers from other blocs to ensure he can retain majority support in parliament.

“Anwar is appointed at a critical juncture in Malaysian history, where politics is most fractured, recovering from a depressed economy and a bitter COVID memory,” said James Chai, visiting fellow at ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.

“Always regarded as the man who could unite all warring factions, it is fitting that Anwar emerged during a divisive time.”

When Laura Fernandez’s fellow dancers at the Stanislavsky Theatre in Moscow began discussing the war in Ukraine, she knew she would have to leave.

Swiss-born, with a Ukrainian mother, Fernandez, 24, was a soloist at the Stanislavsky and rising star of the ballet world when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukraine in late February.

“It was just very difficult to be in the dressing room because people started to discuss (the war)…” she told Reuters.

“They would say ‘no worries, it will end in a week, everything is going to be fine’, but I knew it’s not, it was already starting and then it got worse and worse.”

She also feared for her relatives in her mother’s hometown of Mariupol, the southeastern port city devastated during a prolonged siege before it finally fell in May, and the impact it was having on her mother’s mental health.

“I left because it was morally just very difficult for me to live there because I know what Putin was doing to my family in Ukraine,” she said.

“I mean our family in Mariupol, we lost everything: two, no three apartments. My family had to leave the country without anything. They didn’t have anything, they couldn’t take anything.

“And also, how the people (in Russia) talked about the situation – it was very difficult for me to hear: I would go out of the room with tears in my eyes, trying to hold myself.”

Fernandez joined the Zurich Dance academy in 2010, aged 12, before going on to train in the classical Russian style at the world-famous Vaganova Academy in St Petersburg, which she described as “a dream”.

She had been at the Stanislavsky since 2020 when she decided to leave Russia in March, one of several prominent dancers and choreographers, including Bolshoi prima ballerina Olga Smirnova, to quit the country over the Ukraine war.

In May, she joined the State Ballet of Georgia (SBG) in Tbilisi, where she spoke to Reuters in an interview in between rehearsals of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from the Nutcracker, which the SBG is taking on tour next month.

In between dancing for the SBG, she is also performing in international gala events, including trips this year to Sydney and Los Angeles.

She is enjoying life in Tbilisi, she said, but has not given up hope that she could return to Moscow one day.

I know it’s all Putin and a lot of people are against him; they are just afraid of him, so they don’t act,” she said.

“So, I’m not against Russia, I love Russia, I love Moscow. I also have some great friends in Moscow and I really enjoyed my life there. But, at the moment, I am just not ready yet to go back.”

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Power was gradually being restored to Ukrainian cities including the capital Kyiv on Thursday, a day after Russian missile strikes caused Kyiv’s biggest outages in nine months of war.

Regional authorities said 25% of homes in Kyiv was still without electricity but the water supply had been restored in some areas and would start working in other areas later on Thursday.

In a big improvement from Wednesday, when authorities said power was lost across the entire Kyiv region, public transport was operating in the capital, with buses replacing trams to save power.

“Let’s persevere, despite everything” the Kyiv regional military administration said in a statement.

Energy Minister German Galushchenko said three nuclear power stations that were switched off because of the attacks on Wednesday were expected to be back on line later on Thursday, and this would help ease supply problems.

“The situation is difficult throughout the country,” he said in televised comments, but added that the national energy system had been “reunited” following damage during the missile strikes and power generation would increase throughout Thursday.

Kyiv was one of the main targets of Wednesday’s attacks on energy facilities that cut power in many regions and made emergency blackouts necessary in others to conserve energy and enable repairs as winter sets in.

The temperature plunged below zero degrees Celsius overnight in a city that had 2.8 million residents before the war and where it has already snowed and the streets are icy.

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy chief of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s staff, said power supplies had been restored in the Kirovohrad and Vinnytsia regions.

Power was also largely back in the northern region of Sumy, and 3,000 miners who had been trapped underground during a power outage had been brought to the surface in central Ukraine, regional officials said.

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Microsoft reported that hackers have exploited flaws in a now-discontinued web server called Boa in attacks against critical industries.

Microsoft experts believe that threat actors behind a malicious campaign aimed at Indian critical infrastructure earlier this year have exploited security flaws in a now-discontinued web server called Boa.

The Boa web server is widely used across a variety of devices, including IoT devices, and is often used to access settings and management consoles as well as sign-in screens. The experts pointed out that Boa has been discontinued since 2005.

Researchers at Recorded Future observed several intrusion attempts on Indian critical infrastructure since 2020 and shared IOCs related to this campaign. Microsoft experts analyzed these IoCs and discovered that Boa servers were running on the IP addresses on the list of IOCs, they also explained that the electrical grid attack targeted exposed IoT devices running Boa.

Microsoft also discovered that half of the IP addresses in the list published by Recorded Future returned suspicious HTTP response headers, which might be associated with the active deployment of a malicious tool identified by Recorded Future. 

“Investigating the headers further indicated that over 10% of all active IP addresses returning the headers were related to critical industries, such as the petroleum industry and associated fleet services, with many of the IP addresses associated to IoT devices, such as routers, with unpatched critical vulnerabilities, highlighting an accessible attack vector for malware operators.”reads the report published by Recorded Future. “Most of the suspicious HTTP response headers were returned over a short timeframe of several days, leading researchers to believe they may be associated with intrusion and malicious activity on networks.”

Microsoft experts explained that despite Boa being discontinued in 2005, many vendors across a variety of IoT devices and popular software development kits (SDKs) continue to use it.

The researchers identified over 1 million internet-exposed Boa server components around the world over the span of a week.

“We assessed the vulnerable component to be the Boa web server, which is often used to access settings and management consoles and sign-in screens in devices.” reads the report published by Microsoft.

“Without developers managing the Boa web server, its known vulnerabilities could allow attackers to silently gain access to networks by collecting information from files. Moreover, those affected may be unaware that their devices run services using the discontinued Boa web server, and that firmware updates and downstream patches do not address its known vulnerabilities.”

Boa is known to be affected by multiple flaws, including CVE-2017-9833 and CVE-2021-33558, which can allow unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary files, obtain sensitive information, and gain remote code execution.

“The popularity of the Boa web server displays the potential exposure risk of an insecure supply chain, even when security best practices are applied to devices in the network.” concludes the report.

“As attackers seek new footholds into increasingly secure devices and networks, identifying and preventing distributed security risks through software and hardware supply chains, like outdated components, should be prioritized by organizations.”

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Boa)

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