3/4/22, 1:38 PM y Managing a digital revolution: cyber security capacity building in Myanmar - Routledge Companion to Global Cyber-Security Strategy , y pp p when purchased. In 2010 Myanmar was on the receiving end of what was at the time one of the largest Distributed Denial of Service-attacks (DDoS) to date. The attacks, which consists of flooding connection points with massive amounts of online traffic until they collapse, came in the run?up to the 2010 general election (Labovitz, 2010). As the infrastructure at the time was dependent on a single submarine fiber-optic cable, the attack succeeded in disconnecting the entire country from the Internet. Airline companies, public sector institutions, and citizens were cut off from online services for one month. The connection at the time was so limited that the attack was several hundred times larger than needed to shut down the connection. The government did not have the expertise or any established strategies to deal with the situation. China remedied the situations by providing Internet services for the important ministries through their border. While the source of the attacks has not been made public to this date, suspicion has been directed towards the military junta that governed the country, as dissident websites hosted outside of Myanmar had been targeted earlier in the year (Reporters Without Borders, 2010). There were also similar accusations raised at the Burmese military and government following restrictions of access and information in 2007 (Nizza, 2007). This underlines the risks that digital technologies will erode the turn towards democratic governance, and whether controlling the political discourse has merely taken on another form. The most concerning development has been the rise of vigilante groups pushing a nationalistic agenda by attacking websites and news outlets that are critical of the government, or in some way positive to the country’s Muslim minority (Hindstrom, 2016a). The most active of these group has been identified as the “Blink Hacker Group” which has targeted numerous media websites over the last few years. This group has been linked to the Myanmar military by the Swedish-based cyber security firm Unleashed Research Lab (Hindstrom, 2016b). Their report on the attacks tied the hacker-collective to military servers and training facilities, while the group itself has admitted on Facebook that it consists in part of “Pro-government” members (Unleashed, 2015). This is coupled with a general rise in Islamophobia, and the use of social di i ti t f i l b t diff i th i https://ebrary.net/173520/political_science/managing_digital_revolution_cyber_security_capacity_building_myanmar#aftercont d i l 4/19