Burmese Exile Media Web Site Again Under Attack

By SAW YAN NAING

The Web site of the Mizzima Burmese dissident news organization in exile has again come under attack by pro-regime hackers.

Sein Win, editor of the Mizzima news agency, said the site, www.mizzima.com, had been briefly knocked out on Wednesday morning by hackers calling themselves “Independence Hackers from Burma.” The attack lasted about 10 hours.

Visitors to the site found a crude, ungrammatical message reading: “Dear MIZZIMA Readers...Listen Please, Why Hack This Website?... Because we are Independence Hackers from Burma. We Born for Hack Those F**king Media Website, Which Are Ever Talk about Only Worse News for Our Country. We are very sorry for Webadmin, You Need to More Secure Your Website. Now We Warn to All Media Webadmins That is "Prepare to More Secure Your Work."

Mizzima and three other Burmese opposition Web sites—The Irrawaddy, the Democratic Voice of Burma and Khitpyaing—came under cyber attack late last month.

Mizzima was hacked while the three other sites were bombarded by a so-called “distributed denial-of-service”, or DDoS, which overloads Web sites with an unmanageable amount of traffic.

The attacks coincided with the first anniversary of the regime’s brutal suppression of monk-led demonstrations in September 2007.

Exiled media groups, bloggers, reporters inside Burma and citizen journalists played major roles in reporting on the September 2007 uprising.

As Burmese commemorated the September 2007 uprising, the authorities intensified their watch over Internet cafes in Rangoon. In some Internet cafes, users have to show their ID, while informers observe students playing video games. Buddhist monks complain that they are treated like criminals if they are seen using the Internet.