Anti-Taib Mahmud website Sarawak Report , well-known for scathing articles and exposes' against the Sarawak chief minister came under a concerted cyber attack yesterday which saw the site brought down.

Indeed Malaysiakini's attempts to access the site were unsuccessful.

NONE "Yes, we can confirm we are definitely the victims of a massive attack on our site," site founder Clare Rewcastle Brown told Malaysiakini when contacted today.

Brown said that the attacks has been building up with interruptions over the past week, culminating in a concerted attack beginning yesterday in the UK and then going full-blown and global overnight.

She explained that web experts said it was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the type that brought down Wikileaks at one time.

In a DDoS attack, multiple bots, or programmes running on servers or personal computers will bombard a site's server with requests to view the site.

This is the normal procedure by which computers will request to download data from websites for viewing.

However, the ‘bots' will repeat the demand or request for data multiple times to flood the server, beyond its ability to respond, and/or eating up the available bandwidth of the site.

Attack 'admission' of guilt

Brown indicated her belief that the attack may have originated from Taib and the BN.

NONE "We, of course, regard this as a full admission by BN that our insights and investigations have been causing them major difficulties," she said

"Rather than answer our findings they are trying to cheat by closing us down - however, what are they going to do about what is already in people's heads?" challenged Brown.

However, she assured that the Sarawak Report team are working to get the site up and running.

"We are of course taking measures to counter (the attack)," said the London-based journalist.

Sarawak Report has been publishing damning reports of alleged irregularities and corruption in Sarawak under the Taib administration, something which may have prompted the attack to silence the site in the run-up to the state election this Saturday.