New Delhi – The websites of Mizzima News, an independent Burmese news agency based in New Delhi, India, has been hacked with a Cross-site scripting causing the webites to be inaccessible since early Wednesday morning.
According to Mizzima's webmaster the attackers used the vulnerability in poor-code websites, and took total control of the site. While files from the English and Burmese website were deleted from the database, and had to be recovered from the back-up, the mizzima.tv and mizzimaphoto.com were temporarily down.
But within hours, the problems with the mizzima.com, mizzima.tv and mizimaphoto.com were rectified. However, the Burmese site – mizzimaburmese.com remains inaccessible.
Though it is not known, who is behind the attack, the hacker's internet protocol (IP) is found to have originated from a server in the United States.
Mizzima, however, is still unable to confirm whether the attack is the work of the Burmese military junta, which has banned Mizzima's websites inside the country. Web users bypassing the government's internet filtering systems with the help of proxy and browsing can access Mizzima's sites. But if caught, they would have to pay a heavy penalty.
"It is hard to tell who is behind the attack but someone who has special interest could be the culprit or culprits," said Sein Win, Managing Editor of the Mizzima News.
"However, these people should know that this is a criminal offence" he added.
This is not the first time, however, that the websites of Mizzima as well as other Burmese media groups in exile, including the Chiang Mai based Irrawaddy, Oslo based Democratic Voice of Burma and Bangkok based New Era Journal, have been attacked.
In July, the Burmese website of Mizzima News and the DVB came under a Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS), causing the sites to become inaccessible for several days.
Similarly, on September 24, a day before the first anniversary of last year's monk-led protests in Burma, three Burmese News agencies The Irrawaddy, DVB and New Era Journal in exile came under a DDoS attack.
Mizzima News Agency, run by Burmese journalists, is an independent Burmese multi-media group focusing on Burma and related news and issues, and has four different websites – Mizzima.com, Mizzimaburmese.com, Mizzima.tv, mizzimaphoto.com.
Besides updated daily news both in English and Burmese, Mizzima also Podcasts video stories on its mizzima.tv site, which are frequently picked up by other news organizations.
Both Mizzima's Burmese and English site normally attract an average of 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per day but the readership suddenly jumped to hundreds of thousands during the September protests in Burma last year and in the month of May and June 2008, following the killer Cyclone Nargis' lashing the country.
