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and the Democratic Voice of Burma were hit with DDoS attacks that overloaded the Web sites and rendered them inaccessible.30 Similar attacks have occurred on subsequent anniversaries of the Saffron Revolution and the 1988 student protest known as the “8888 Uprising.� The timing and coordination of these attacks suggest that the motivation behind them may be to censor the Web sites from commemorating the protests and possibly mobilizing new political actions. It is unclear who was behind the attacks, although it is widely believed that the military or government played a role, since the regime maintains a strong interest in information control and actively seeks to silence opposition voices.31 Opposition groups have come under persistent cyber attacks over the years and many believe such attacks are part of a wider campaign of state-sanctioned harassment.32 However, positively determining attribution, motivations, and the extent of the attackers’ abilities is a difficult task. Mizzima News Defacement Attack One example of the persistent attacks on Burmese independent media is the compromise and defacement of the Mizzima News Web site (http://www.mizzima.com) on October 1, 2008.33 The original content of the site was replaced with a message from the attackers (figure 8.1): Dear MIZZIMA Reader. . . . Listen please, Why Hack This Website? . . . Because We are Independence Hackers from Burma. We Born for Hack Those Fucking Media Website, Which are Ever Talk about Only Worse News For Our Country. We Very Sorry for Web Admin, You Need To More
Figure 8.1 A screen capture of the defacement of Mizzima.com.