Hackers of Rohingya supporter shut down several Myanmar government websites

Various government websites were reportedly hacked by supporters of the Rohingya making it not accessible yesterday. The campaign is to emphasize how Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya are treated, news report from SBS.

The hackers known as Anonymous are responsible for a string of socio-political cyber attacks and unfortunately Myanmar is the latest among their victims. Government sites that were listed in the previous distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS) in which the anonymous group revealed that they are responsible include government sites in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia.

The campaign, called Rohingya, aimed to “Stop the Rohingya genocide in Burma/Myanmar” and coincided with a “Twitter storm” which saw the hastag #Rohingya NOW trending across social media sites.

On the other hand, Melbourne University’s Dr Suelette Dreyfus, who has widely written articles regarding underground hacking disclosed that the credibility of these attacks by Anonymous which she describe as social change agents is sometimes disbelieving.

Many say that to make the attack more intense by a social activists’ opinion is to replace the message wherein they are redirected to a different website or introduce different content, the report said.

She further added that the DDOS attacks must not be ignored since they are very effective. Attacks of these kinds are preferable to more aggressive or damaging forms of activism.

Without overlooking activities that are unlawful it gives a restriction to government’s behaving less than fairly by informing them that someone will make the effort to correct on their activities.

At the time of publication, the Myanmar government sites SBS checked were in operation.