Burmese website hacked
on Saffron Revolution anniv

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA) learned Monday that the website of “Irrawady”, a Thailand-based magazine which is a leading critic of the Burmese junta, has been experiencing a “distributed denial of service attack” (DDoS) since midnight. The attack coincides with the anniversary of the 2007 “Saffron Revolution,” anti-government protests in Burma led by thousands of Buddhists monks.

In the meantime, “Irrawady” has put up a mirror site at http://www.theirrawaddy.blogspot.com/.

The Southeast Asian Press Alliance is a coalition of journalist and press freedom advocacy groups from around Southeast Asia. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism is a founding member of the organization, which has the specific mandate of promoting and protecting press freedom in the region.

The full SEAPA report follows.

Burmese magazine’s websites hacked

Thailand-based magazine, “Irrawaddy”, which is a leading critic of the Burmese junta, reported that its website has been under attack since midnight of Monday, 27 September 2010.

The magazine’s general manager, Win Thu, told SEAPA that the “Irrawaddy’s” English and Burmese websites at www.irrawaddy.org and www.irrawaddy.org/burhave been under “distributed denial of service attack” (DDoS) since 12:30 a.m. on Monday. Its mirror site at www.irrawaddymedia.com has also been under attack.

The magazine put up another mirror site (http://www.theirrawaddy.blogspot.com/) where it posted a note saying that the “attacks coincide with the third anniversary of the ‘Saffron Revolution,’ the monk-led protest in Burma. The first major attack was in September 2008, on the [revolution’s] first anniversary.”

“According to an e-mail sent by the website host in the US to ‘The Irrawaddy’ webmaster team, the website [suffered] a high volume attack which overloaded its capacity to provide service,” Irrawaddy further wrote in its new mirror site.

Win Thu gave assurance on the mirror site that the attack would be short-term, “but it has disrupted the daily news production and access by our readers.”

He said “The Irrawaddy” web team is now trying to recover the websites. In 2008, it took three days to recover the website, according to technicians.

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The Southeast Asian Press Alliance (http://www.seapa.org) is a coalition of press freedom advocacy groups from Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. Established in November 1998, it is the only regional network with the specific mandate of promoting and protecting press freedom throughout Southeast Asia. SEAPA is composed of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (Indonesia), the Jakarta-based Institute for the Study of the Free Flow of Information (ISAI), the Manila-based Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Thai Journalists Association. SEAPA also has partners in Malaysia, Cambodia, East Timor, and exiled Burmese media, and undertakes projects and programs for press freedom throughout the region.

For inquiries, please contact us at: seapa@seapa.org, or call +662 243 5579.