By NYAN HLAING LYNN | FRONTIER
NAY PYI TAW — Information Ministry officials are scrambling to fend off a Distributed Denial of Service attack that has shut down the ministry’s website for much of the past two days.
U Myint Kyaw, director of the ministry’s Information and Public Relations Department, said the attacks began on Sunday.
“We are trying to get the site back up and running,” he told Frontier.
The ministry is also focused on finding out “which country or group of people” were responsible for the attack, he said, adding that a ministry technical team was investigating.
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“As soon as we get the report on the investigation we will let the people know the details.”
He suggested that the attacks may be driven by events in Maungdaw Township, Rakhine State, where security forces have been accused of perpetrating rights abuses against the Muslim community in the wake of a series of coordinated attacks on Border Guard Police outposts on October 9. The government has used state media to reject the allegations.
“I can’t say exactly why but we are very often facing DDoS attacks,” Myint Kyaw said.
DDoS attacks typically bring down a site by flooding its with requests, often through the use of infected computers controlled remotely.
