KUALA LUMPUR, 15 March — The Democratic Action Party (DAP) has faced its ‘fiercest attack so far’ on its websites, when a series of multiple online interruption paralyzed all operations of the party’s online portals, hinting a high possibility of a politically-motivated sabotage.

On 8, 10 and 13 March the websites were inaccessible, with users reported difficulties accessing the DAP’s official website (dapmalaysia.org) and the party’s widely-read Bahasa Malaysia mouthpiece, Roketkini (roketkini.com).

The status of the affected websites returned to normal on the morning of 15 March, but the DAP National Publicity Secretary, Tony Pua remained firm that the attacks bore political drives.

“We can only assume that these attacks were politically-motivated and politically-funded and will only increase as the elections get nearer,” Pua said.

“It is the fiercest attack we had so far,” stressed Pua. “So bad that our service provider had to ‘unplug’ the server.”

DDoS attack politically motivated?

Tony Pua, who is also the Member of Parliament for Petaling Jaya Utara said the mode of attack used against the websites is known as DDoS, a computing term for ‘distributed denial of service attack’ typically targeting sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers.

Explaining further, Pua said, during the attack, the amount of the data impact on the server for the websites was over 240 times the normal traffic.

“They just give so much traffic to the site, so that the site cannot cope with it,” he said.

Increased sabotage predicted as elections loom closer

The DAP parliamentarian also did not dismiss the possibility of the attacks to reoccur, predicting more ‘perpetual attacks’ on the websites come the 13^th General Election.

“We believe that the current attacks are just a test-round to determine whether they can block our websites to be accessed by web users,” he said.

“It is interesting that, of all the sites that have been attacked — regularly — it is always the DAP, PAS and PKR websites, Malaysiakini, even Malaysian Insider, that have been attacked,” Pua said. “But we have never heard of reports where Barisan Nasional websites were attacked.”

Pua also called on all parties across the political divide to not resort to ‘black operations’ as the means of winning the coming elections.

“We condemn this attacks and we hope for these attacks to stop. It is going to be a hard-fought and dirty election campaign, but we [the DAP and Pakatan Rakyat] are fully prepared for it and we will do our best to fight the odds,” he said. — The Rocket