While the exact cause of an attack on Mizzima's websites could not be verified, the Burmese media organisation has received threats over its coverage of ongoing hostilities in Rakhine State.
(Mizzima News/IFEX) – 27 August 2012, Rangoon – Starting on Friday 24 August 2012, Mizzima’s websites in English and Burmese have been under a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack.
Mizzima issued a statement on Saturday saying: “While Mizzima’s editorial team cannot verify the exact cause of this attack, Mizzima has received several threats in recent weeks in reference to our coverage of ongoing hostilities in Rakhine State.”
The DDos attack started on Friday evening, shutting down the site for many readers. On Saturday 25 August, in some locations in Burma, Mizzima’s websites went down totally.
As of the afternoon of 27 August, the English website was providing access although at a slower processing time.
DDoS is a type of attack that overloads traffic in a server, resulting in slow processing time or complete shutdown of the server.
Most of the attacks on Mizzima’s websites are based in Malaysia and came from servers in Malaysia; the second most number of attacks came from servers in the US.
DDoS attempts also came from England, Canada, India and Burma.
Mizzima websites came under similar DDoS attacks during the ‘Saffron Revolution’ in September 2007, shortly after Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and in the pre-election period in 2010.
