Dear Mizzima Friends and Subscribers,

Since Thursday evening Mizzima's websites have attracted several hacking attempts, resulting in the sites being on and off for about 24 hours. However later on Friday, our sites were completely knocked down by a DDoS attack.

With consistent attempts to hack our sites and sophisticated and coordinated DDoS attacks, our hosting company, hostpapa.ca in Canada, notified us that they have suspended our site, fearing that it may harm other sites on the server.

According to Mizzima's technical staff, the hacking attempt is very sophisticated, well-timed and organized. The hacking file uses more than 4,000 lines of code and is adapted from a popular PHP Shell script.

While it is still unclear who is behind the attacks, with the sophisticated nature and the use of coordinated efforts in the attempted hacks, we assume that it can only be the work of an organized group of individuals with a huge amount of resources.

Similar to our case, several Burmese exile media groups including the Irrawaddy, the New Era Journal and Democratic Voice of Burma have all come under similar attacks in recent months. This makes us think the attacks and attempted hacks are orchestrated by our common enemy, who make no attempt to hide their loathing for us and the news and information that we produce on their activities as well as those of the people of Burma.

Our technical staff is working almost 18 hours a day to resolve the problem. But unfortunately we still don't know when we will be able to return to regular service.

Our technical support team members have informed us that several companies have rejected our inquiry to host our sites, as they fear our sites might attract DDoS attacks and attempted hacks which can cause severe problems to the server itself.

However we are not giving up as it is an act to suppress the freedom of expression and independent journalism.

We know that the military junta is determined to prevent the flow of information in and out of Burma and we are not overlooking the possibility of the junta orchestrating these attacks targeting Mizzima and other Burmese exile media groups.

But these attacks will only strengthen our determination in carrying out our mission to bring news and information on Burma and related issues.

Meanwhile, for our readers we will continue to bring you updated and timely news and analysis through our email service in the listserv.

We would sincerely like to express our gratitude to all of our friends who are now helping us in trying to solve the problem. We also thank all our readers for your patience and continued support.

We would also like to ask our readers for any kind support, technical advice or expertise that you can lend us. We are now looking into the possibilities of reconstructing our site and changing the web hosting. We would, therefore, appreciate any kind of help or support in our work and would like to invite any interested donors to contribute.

Thank you,

Soe Myint
Mizzima News Agency

editor@mizzima.com
mizzima@mizzima.com
Mizzima.news@gmail.com