A cyber attack beginning at 11am today shut down Malaysiakini servers simultaneously, making the website inaccessible to readers four days ahead of the Sarawak election.
The Malaysiakini technical team has determined it to be a denial-of-service attack, where an attacker uses computers in different parts of the world to swarm Malaysiakini servers to the point that they are unable to cope with the massive traffic.
Both our servers, which are hosted at two data centres - TM Brickfields and Jaring - have been affected by the attack. It is learnt that the attack was launched from overseas.
Malaysiakini has posted all of today's reports in Facebook. Readers can access Malaysiakini in full via Facebook Notes.
We will soon be making our reports, especially those on the Sarawak election, available on http://malaysiakinicom.wordpress.com or
For Bahasa Malaysia, go to http://www.facebook.com/mkinibm.
Malaysiakini is also working to bring up a new set of servers.
We apologise for the technical problem and we will keep readers
informed of developments via Facebook and Twitter.
Similar to attacks on 'Sarawak Report'
The attack on Malaysiakini came three days after Sarawak Report, a website which has been critical of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, was shut down by a similar assault.
According to site founder Clare Rewcastle Brown, the attacks has been building up with interruptions over the past week, culminating in a concerted attack over the weekend.
She explained that web experts said it was a distributed denial of service attack - the type that brought down Wikileaks at one time.
In a DOS attack, multiple bots, or programmes running on servers or personal computers in different countries are used to bombard a site's server with multiple requests to view the site.
The ‘bots' will repeat the request for data so many times they flood the server, beyond its ability to respond.
Sarawak Report has this morning moved to a new address - http://www1.sarawakreport.org/
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