Burma Taken Off-Net By Cyber Attack

The Asian nation of Myanmar, still widely known as Burma, has been virtually taken of the Net by a sustained attack of unknonw origin.

Acording to analysis by Arbor Networks the cyber-warfare attack, which centred on the main Myanmar internet provider, the state-owned Ministry of Post and Telecommunications (PTT), has been going for several days and provided enough bogus traffic to swamp the relatively small links the country has to the Internet.

Biggest ever cyber-warfare attack?

The attack is bigger than similar attacks on Georgia and Estonia, and no-one knows who is behind it, although it has been speculated on Twitter that the government itself may have instigated it ahead of a general election on 7 November. It has been widely reported that the Government was behind an Internet failure during the anti-government protests in August 2007

”We estimate the Myanmar DDoS is between 10-15 Gbps,” said Craig Labovitz of Arbor Networks, “several hundred times more than enough to overwhelm the country’s 45 Mbps T3 terrestrial and satellite links”

The attack includes many components such as TCP syn floods, and rst floods against multiple IP addresses within the PTT’s address blocks and is apparently coming in from a broad range of source addresses from twenty or more providers.

In the UK the Home Secretary Theresa May recently promised increased measures against cyber warfare, and funding for cyber defence was boosted in the budget, following warnings from the head of GCHQ that Britain faces “credible” cyber-attack threats.

The attack on Burma comes while Europe is holding a cyber security exercise designed to test its readiness for such an incident.