(March 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The news site Ashin-Mettacara.com, of Burmese monk in exile Ashin Mettacara, was attacked twice in the past week with DDoS attacks. The first attack came on March 11th and the second on March 15th. A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) usually aims at flooding a web server with so many queries to requests as to render it unable to process further requests. The query limit on Ashin-Mettacara.com, which is designed to accept huge volumes of traffic, was exceeded within the span of an hour on both of these dates.
This is not the first time a Burmese news site in exile has been hacked using this method; last fall the news sites Mizzima and Irrawaddy were both victim of DDoS attacks. The perpetrators of these attacks are still unknown and have yet to be brought to justice. The attacks of March 11th and March 15th were the second attacks on Ashin-Mettacra.com, the first wave of them occurred January 20th and 21st 2009 shortly after the launch of the website.
The attacks on Ashin-Mettacara.com took place at a time when Ashin was lecturing on web programming to over 50 monks and could not monitor his site. The site, which gathers news from all over the world and is crawled by Google News, has the slogan “Free Press for Freedom of Thought, Belief and Expression”. It is clear that whoever is behind these attacks does not share the values of the writers that publish their news on the site daily or those of their readers. It is unclear whether the Burma’s military junta is responsible for the attacks.
We would like to thank our regular readers for supporting this site and hope that you will continue to support it in the face of these blatant attempts to silence those who believe in freedom and respect.-Sri Lanka Guardian
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