Mizzima News

Chiang Mai - The websites of three Burmese news agencies in exile – the Democratic Voice of Burma, The Irrawaddy and the New Era Journal – almost simultaneously have come under persistent and severe Distributed Denial of Services attack, leading to the websites becoming inaccessible since Wednesday afternoon.

DDoS attacks flooded the communication channel of web servers with data to an extent that the sites could no longer handle it. The attack is a blatant attempt to disable websites, by overwhelming the sites with information requests so that it cannot respond to regular traffic.

Surfers said the websites of the three Burmese news agencies had failed to respond to their request since Wednesday afternoon.

"It is pretty certain that we are under attack. We have been attacked at about 11 a.m. today," Toe Zaw Latt, chief of DVB Thailand bureau told Mizzima.

Similarly, the Chiang Mai based 'The Irrawaddy' said its website has been facing problems since Tuesday evening.

"But technically, we could confirm it only today that we are being attacked," Aung Zaw, Editor-In-chief of 'The Irrawaddy' told Mizzima.

The Bangkok based 'New Era Journal' also confirmed that its website had been facing an attack where surfers were unable to access the site.

The attack is the second for the Oslo based DVB in the past three months, after its website was down for several days due to a similar attack in July.

In July the Burmese website of Mizzima News, another Burmese news agency based in New Delhi, India, also suffered a similar DDoS attack.

The webmaster of the DVB said, it is difficult to determine the level of the attack and it is also difficult to predict when the sites will be accessible again.

"Though we do not know who is behind the attack, it is certain that the attacks are targeted," Toe Zaw Latt said.