killed, he republished his own Facebook post from 2014 that included photos of a
notebook with the names and contact information of alleged smugglers. 69 His
colleagues suspect that the murder is related to his online activities and reporting,
though the murder was unsolved in mid-2017. 70
On May 26, 2017, Kantarawaddy Times reporter Maw Oo Myar was abducted near the
town of Loikaw, in southeastern Kayah State. Her abductors crashed their car and she
was unconscious in hospital for three days. 71 It was unclear what triggered the
attack. Maw Oo Myar reported on politics, women's rights, business, and public health.
72
The Kantarawaddy Times is active and influential online, especially on Facebook,
and Maw Oo Myar also produced a regular segment for the multimedia broadcaster
Democratic Voice of Burma. Other journalists working for the outlet received threats
in 2016 and 2017.
Technical Attacks
Media and civil society websites are periodically subject to cyberattacks, including at
least one incident under the new government. In June 2016, a website operated by the
Eleven Media Group was hacked by the so-called "Union of Hacktivists" hacker group.
Eleven Media said the attack was in retaliation for its criticism of the new
administration’s reforms. The website was defaced in the attack, which lasted about
an hour. 73 Researchers have concluded that a string of media website defacements
carried out by the same group since 2012 have been initiated on military premises. 74
Government sites were also attacked. On January10, 2017, the Ministry of Information
announced that its website had suffered a two-day DDoS (distributed denial of
service) attack, a malicious attempt to disrupt a network by flooding its bandwidth.
75
Footnotes
1
“Who will help Myanmar's Rohingya?” BBC, January 10, 2017,
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-38168917; Human Rights Watch, “Myanmar: Rohingya
Muslims Face Humanitarian Crisis,” March 26, 2013, http://bit.ly/1HSsJdA.
2
https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/burma#f3ec3e;
https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/09/08/burma-rohingya-describe-military-at….