[Infowarrior] - Attack Severs Myanmar Internet

[Richard Forno]

Attack Severs Myanmar Internet

by Craig Labovitz

Back in 2007, the Myanmar government reportedly severed all Myanmar Internet connectivity in a crackdown over growing political unrest.

Yesterday, Myanmar once again fell off the Internet. Over the course of the past several days, Myanmar’s main Internet provider, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication (or PTT for short), suffered a large, sustained DDoS attack disrupting most network traffic in and out of the country.

While motivation for the attack is unknown, Twitter and Blogs have been awash in speculation ranging from blaming the Myanmar government (preemptively disrupting Internet connectivity ahead of the November 7 general elections) to external attackers with still mysterious motives. The Myanmar Times reports the attack has been ongoing since October 25th (and adds the attack may impact Myanmar’s tourist industry).

We estimate the Myanmar DDoS between 10-15 Gbps (several hundred times more than enough to overwhelm the country’s 45 Mbps T3 terrestrial and satellite links). The DDoS includes dozens of individual attack components (e.g. TCP syn, rst flood) against multiple IP addresses within PTT’s address blocks (203.81.64.0/19, 203.81.72.0/24,  203.81.81.0/24 and 203.81.82.0/24). The attack also appears fairly well-distributed — ATLAS data shows attack traffic across 20 or more providers with a broad range of source addresses.

A summary of the attack statistics in the chart below:

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http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2010/11/attac-severs-myanmar-internet/