DDoS attacks take out Asian nation

Myanmar was severed from the internet on Tuesday following more than 10 days of distributed denial of service attacks that culminated in a massive data flood that overwhelmed the Southeast Asian country's infrastructure, a researcher said.

The DDoS assault directed as much as 15 Gbps of junk data to Myanmar's main internet provider, more than 15 times bigger than the 2007 attack that brought some official Estonian websites to their knees, said Craig Labovitz, a researcher at Arbor Networks. It was evenly distributed throughout Myanmar's 20 or so providers and included multiple variations, including TCP SYN, and RST.

“While DDoS against e-commerce and commercial sites are common (hundreds per day), large-scale geo-politically motivated attacks — especially ones targeting an entire country — remain rare with a few notable exceptions,” Labovitz wrote, referring to the Georgia attacks, which coincided with the country's armed conflict with Russia. “At 10-15 Gbps, the Myanmar [DDoS attack] is also significantly larger than the 2007 Georgia (814 Mbps) and Estonia DDoS.”

The attacks come ahead of the November 7 general elections set by the military junta that rules Myanmar. Many critics of the government say it launched the attacks in an attempt to manipulate the outcome. Others have blamed external forces. The data flood began 10 days ago, according to The People's Daily in China, which borders Myanmar. ®