The websites of Mizzima News, an independent Burmese news
agency based in New Delhi, India, have been hacked, rendering the websites
inaccessible since the early morning of 1 October 2008.

According to Mizzima's webmaster, the attackers took advantage of the
sites' code weakness. Even as files from the English and Burmese websites
were deleted from the database, and had to be recovered from the back-up,
the http://www.mizzima.tv/ , http://www.mizzima.com and
http://www.mizzimaphoto.com websites were temporarily down.

Although the problems with the mizzima.com, mizzima.tv and mizimaphoto.com
websites were rectified, the Burmese site, http://www.mizzimaburmese.com ,
remained inaccessible as of 1 October.

Although it is not known who is behind the attack, the hacker's internet
protocol (IP) is found to have originated from a server in the United
States.

Mizzima, however, is still unable to confirm whether the attack is the work
of the Burmese military junta, which has banned Mizzima's websites inside
the country. Web users bypassing the government's Internet filtering
systems with the help of proxy and browsing can access Mizzima's sites. If
they are caught, however, they would have to pay a heavy penalty.

"It is hard to tell who is behind the attack but someone who has a special
interest could be the culprit or culprits," said Sein Win, managing editor
of Mizzima News.

"However, these people should know that this is a criminal offence," he
added.

This is not the first time that the websites of Mizzima, as well as other
Burmese media groups in exile, including the Chiang Mai-based "Irrawaddy",
Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and Bangkok- based "New Era
Journal", have been attacked.

In July, the Burmese websites of Mizzima News and the DVB came under a
Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) attack, causing the sites to become
inaccessible for several days.

Similarly, on 24 September, a day before the first anniversary of the 2007
monk-led protests in Burma, three Burmese news agencies in exile, "The
Irrawaddy", DVB and "New Era Journal", came under a DDoS attack.

BACKGROUND:
Mizzima News Agency, run by Burmese journalists, is an independent Burmese
multi-media group focusing on Burma and related news and issues, and has
four different websites - Mizzima.com, Mizzimaburmese.com, Mizzima.tv and
mizzimaphoto.com.

Besides offering updated daily news both in English and Burmese, Mizzima
also podcasts video stories on its mizzima.tv site, which are frequently
picked up by other news organizations.

Both Mizzima's Burmese and English sites normally attract an average of
10,000 to 15,000 unique visitors per day but the readership suddenly jumped
to hundreds of thousands during the September 2007 protests in Burma and in
May and June 2008, following the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis.

For further information on the recent attack on news agencies' websites,
see: http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/97090/

For further information on the July attack on the Mizzima and DVD websites,
see: http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/95809/