Politically motivated hackers appear to be targeting Burma with a massive, sustained DDoS attack in the run-up to Sunday's elections.
Burma's main ISP - the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (MPT) - has been bombarded with a large scale DDoS, disrupting the majority of traffic to and from the country, security firm Arbor Networks said.
The assault is believed to have started on October 25, but attack traffic has spiked this month, Arbor said.
At its peak, the attack involved data transfer rates of over 15Gbps – hundreds of times more than is needed to overwhelm Burma's 45Mbps T3 terrestrial and satellite links.
The sophisticated DDoS contains dozens of different attack components, and traffic has been registered from IPs across at least 20 different providers.
Attempts to access Burmese websites - including the MPT's own website - are still timing out today.
While Arbor Networks' Craig Labovitz stopped short of saying the attack was definitely politically motivated, he said it shared characteristics of previous incidents internationally involving both activist hackers and censorial governments.
The Burmese assault is significantly larger than the DDoS attacks on Estonia and Burma in 2007, he said.
Burma's military junta will hold the impoverished south Asian nation’s first election in 20 years on Sunday. The generals have established election rules that essentially guarantee their victory. The last poll, won in a landslide by Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD), was quashed.