Kuala Lumpur: Malaysia is investigating the alleged hacking of computers and email accounts of officials involved in the search for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, a news report said on Wednesday.

The hackers siphoned off classified information related to the plane a day after it disappeared on March 8, and transferred the data to a location in China, Amirudin Abdul Wahab, Cybersecurity Malaysia chief executive, was quoted as saying.

The head of the government cybersecurity agency told The Star newspaper that 30 computers belonging to those involved in the international search for the jet were infected by malware.

The malware was disguised as a news article about the disappearance of the plane, and sent to ranking officials, he said.

The hacked emails “contained confidential data from the officials’ computers, including minutes of meetings and classified documents,” The Star quoted Amirudin as saying. “Some of these were related to the MH370 investigation.”

Cybersecurity Malaysia said it shut down the infected machines, and asked Chinese internet providers to block the transmission of the data, but the request was made a few days after the hacking was discovered.

The agency was working with Interpol to identify the people behind the incident.

Following the disappearance of MH370, Malaysian authorities were accused of hiding information about the Beijing-bound flight which carried 239 people, including 153 Chinese nationals.

Amirudin said that all the information related to MH370 had now been released to the public.

Meanwhile, a new underwater hunt for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 had a “reasonable chance” of finding the plane, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Wednesday, adding that searchers would not give up easily.

Flight MH370 vanished inexplicably en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, and there has been no sign since of the aircraft or the 239 people on-board.

It is believed to have crashed into the southern Indian Ocean far off the west coast of Australia, but a massive air and sea search failed to find any wreckage while an underwater probe gave no answers.

Experts have now used technical data to finalise the most likely resting place of the plane deep on the ocean seabed and are preparing for a more intense underwater search to find it.

“They are now going to search the entire probable impact zone which is, from memory, something like 60,000 square kilometres (23,000 square miles) of the ocean floor, off the coast of Western Australia,” Abbott told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“If the plane is down there — and the best expert advice is that it did go into the water somewhere in this arc off the coast of Western Australia — if the plane is down there, there is a reasonable chance that we’ll find it because we are using the best possible technology.”

Abbott said authorities “did the best we could with the equipment available” in the first stage of the search in harsh and remote seas.

He said the next stage, the deepwater search for which Australia has engaged Dutch firm Fugro Survey, would start “in the next month or so” and could take up to a year.

Abbott has repeatedly said Australia will do its utmost to find the plane and help determine what went wrong with the Boeing 777 to provide closure to the families of those on-board and the flying public generally.

“We’re determined to do the right thing by the Australian families who lost their loved ones in this plane, we’re determined to do the right thing by all of the bereaved families,” he said.

“And we’ve got a long way to go before we’re going to give this one up.”

Six Australians were on-board MH370, with the majority of passengers from China.

The sea floor search will use sonar equipment and video cameras to locate and identify any debris.