Myanmar's military junta has launched a series of crippling cyberspace attacks on dissident websites on the first anniversary of major protest marches by Buddhist monks, the sites said today.
The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based weekly journal and website (www.irrawaddy.org) covering the former Burma described the online assault as persistent and "very sophisticated".
In a posting on a temporary site hosted on a back-up server, it also made a direct connection between the start of the cyber-attack on Wednesday and the monk-led protests that began in Yangon on September18th last year.
"Burma's military authorities obviously did not want any similar sentiments this year and, once again, shot down their enemies," Irrawaddy editor Aung Zaw said.
There were similar outages at the Burmese-language New Era Journal and the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) (www.dvb.no), an Olso-based news outlet that aired footage and images of the 2007 protests and the ensuing crackdown, in which at least 31 people were killed.
Irrawaddy said Thai web host I-NET had confirmed on Wednesday its site had been under "distributed denial-of-service" assault.
In "denial-of-service" attacks a website is bombarded with so much traffic it grinds to a halt.
The Internet inside Myanmar had also been running even slower than its normal snail's pace this week and internet cafes had come under unusually tight surveillance, the Irrawaddy said, suggesting junta unease at the protest anniversary.
Security was also tight on the streets of Yangon, with some vehicle checkpoints, one diplomat said.
The protests started in August 2007 with small demonstrations against declining living standards, but soon sucked in the revered Buddhist monkhood and snowballed into the biggest challenge to military rule since a 1988 uprising.
Reuters