Two leading news organizations of Burmese exiles reported persistent and severe attacks on their respective online servers this past week.
SEAPA partner Mizzima News, a Burmese independent news agency based in New Delhi, India, reported that its website has been inaccessible since 27 July due to persistent and severe Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attacks.
On the other hand, the website of Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma has also been under similar attack since July 20.
Mizzima said its website received more than 5 GB of data in less than 15 minutes, many times more than it usually gets, said its webmaster, adding that this amount of information is more than what the site can handle.
The webmaster explained that a DDoS attack is an attempt to disable a website by overwhelming it with information requests, making it incapable of responding to regular traffic.
In a statement released on 25 July, DVB Deputy Executive Director Khin Maung Win accused the Burmese military government of staging the online attacks.
"We can easily say that the junta is behind this," he said.
In an email sent to media outlets, Khin Maung Win asked for support as his organization is trying to find a solution to fend off the online attacks. DVB is a major Burmese news agency that provides TV reports direct from Burma.
Mizzima also voiced suspicions that the military government is the one behind this disruption.
An IT consultant for Mizzima explained that there had been a lot of intrusion attempts from servers in China, Russia and Hungary. At least 30 servers are involved in the attack, he added.
Mizzima said Burmese IT specialists and engineers loyal to the military regime are known to be studying in the said countries.
Mizzima News Agency, run by Burmese journalists, is an independent Burmese multi-media group focusing on Burma and related news and issues. It maintains three different websites--Mizzima.com, Mizzimaburmese.com and Mizzima.tv.
Besides distributing daily news both in English and Burmese, Mizzima also Podcast video stories on its Mizzima.tv site, which are frequently picked up by other news organizations.
Both Mizzima's Burmese and English sites attract an average of 10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per day but the number of hits jumped to hundreds of thousands during the September protests in Burma last year and in May and June this year, following the destruction wrought by Cyclone Nargis.
