Myanmar junta takes out critical websites - dissidents

By Ed Cropley

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Myanmar's military junta has launched a series of crippling cyberspace attacks on dissident websites on the first anniversary of major protest marches by Buddhist monks, the sites said on Friday.

The Irrawaddy, a Thailand-based weekly journal and website (www.irrawaddy.org) covering the former Burma, described the online assault as persistent and "very sophisticated".

In a posting on a temporary site hosted on a back-up server, it also made a direct connection between the start of the cyber-attack on Wednesday and the monk-led protests that began in Yangon on Sept. 18 last year.

"Burma's military authorities obviously did not want any similar sentiments this year and, once again, shot down their enemies," Irrawaddy editor Aung Zaw said.

There were similar outages at the Burmese-language New Era Journal and the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) (www.dvb.no), an Olso-based news outlet that aired footage and images of the 2007 protests and the ensuing crackdown, in which at least 31 people were killed.

Irrawaddy said Thai web host I-NET had confirmed on Wednesday its site had been under "distributed denial-of-service" assault.

In "denial-of-service" attacks a website is bombarded with so much traffic it grinds to a halt.

DVB's Thailand bureau chief, Toe Zaw Latt, said the agency's website was only a small part of its reporting operations, and its radio and satellite television stations, both major sources of news inside Myanmar, remained up and running.