A campaign to highlight the treatment of Myanmar's ethnic Rohingya people reportedly disabled government websites and propelled the Twitter hashtag "#RohingyaNOW" to the number one trend on Monday.
Myanmar is the latest in a target in a string of socio-political cyber attacks by hacking group Anonymous, with several government sites reportedly inaccessible yesterday.
Previous distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDOS), for which the group had claimed responsibility, include government sites in Syria, Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
The campaign, called OpRohingya, aimed to “Stop the Rohingya genocide in Burma/Myanmar” and coincided with a “Twitter storm” which saw the hastag #RohingyaNOW trending across social media sites.
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But Melbourne University's Dr Suelette Dreyfus, who has written extensively on underground hacking, says that the value of these attacks by Anonymous, who she called “social change agents”, is sometimes questionable.
“Some would argue that a more acute and impactful attack from a social activist point of view is replacing the message, where you are redirected to a different website or inserting different content,”
“I don't want to discount them [DDOS attacks] – they are very effective.“
She said that attacks like these are preferable to more violent or damaging forms of activism.
“You are drawing attention to the issue. For the amount of damage they do, relative to the attention they bring to seriously unethical behaviour, it's a pretty good.”
“Without condoning illegal activities, it provides a deterrent to government's behaving less than ethically by letting them know that someone is going to shine a light on their activities.”
At the time of publication, the Myanmar government sites SBS checked were in operation.
