Sarawak report under DDoS attack

KUCHING: Online news blog Sarawak Report, which has been disclosing revelations on Chief Minister Taib Mahmud’s extensive business empire and unexplainable wealth running into billions of US dollars, has come under massive attack.

According to Sarawak Report owner Clare Rewcastle Brown, the site has been experiencing interrruptions over the past week “which culminated in concerted attack yesterday in the UK and then going fullblown and global overnight”.

“Our web experts say it is a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDOS) , the same form of attack that brought down WikiLeaks.

“They use robots to shoot bits of software to flood the server,” said Rewcastle in an email to FMT.

She blames Barisan Nasional for the attacks on her site.

She said it appeared that BN has suddenly realised the growing spread of information about corruption in Sarwak.

“We regard it as the latest of a series of highly inept and dishonest attempts to undermine our website.

“Clearly BN do not find themselves in a position to answer our findings and arguments, so they have taken the cheat route instead.

“Their methods of attacking us have all be very expensive, but highly counter-productive and have caused them to look pretty foolish in the process.

“They can’t seem to control the internet anymore. With the election campaign underway, Taib can’t seem to explain his wealth anymore,” she said.

Different counter attacks

She said BN had tried different ways of counter-attacking Sarawak Report.

“First they tried to out-number us with 30 or so look alike sites, all praising Taib Mahmud. Then they tried to ‘piggy-back’ us with a sound alike site with an almost identical name!

“Next they started posting paid ads for their site at the top of the google search page for Sarawak Report.

“By this time we had a loyal readership and they still made no impact at all.

“So, now the ultimate cheat. They have thrown more money into an attempt to knock us out altogether,” she said.

She added that all latest articles will now be posted in Sarawak Report’s Facebook until the site is back up.

New article on BN’s cyber war

In line with that, Rewcastle has put out a new article on the ‘BN’s cyber war’

According to new report, there have been dozens of new sites which have popped up under the control of PBB Youth Information leader, Abdul Aziz Adenan Satem, who is the son of Adenan Satem, Taib’s PBB Information Chief. He is also Taib’s nephew.

The report continues to state:

“All these sites are just like the Borneo Post and are by definition as boring as hell with the finger-prints of BN propaganda over every line. But, Abdul Aziz’s biggest and proudest effort has been a site called Sarawak Reports.

As they say ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, so of course we all know that this means that young Abdul regards our site to be a massive success and he wants others to come to his site thinking they are visiting ours.

This attempt to ‘piggy-back’ our site is in fact a well-known tactic by cheat marketing outfits. Such people hope that a person, looking for say a washing machine, will Google for a reputable site and end up by mistake purchasing from the dodgy replica site instead.

In a crass attempt to disguise their involvement in the site, they have hosted it  through an outfit in the USA, run by a fellow called Todd Ash of Easy Internet Marketing in Scottsdale, Arizona.

His own advertising tells you all you need to know about Todd Ash, who likes to call himself “billionaire” and aggressively threatens any critics of his various get rich quick schemes, which range from using water as petrol to chain marketing ventures.”

Sarawak Report’s latest article can be accessed at www.facebook.com/sarawakreport.