PAS' online party organ Harakah Daily has been hit by cyber attacks from 10 last night, days after similar attacks inundated news portal Malaysiakini and whistleblower website Sarawak Report .

According to reports on its website, Harakah Daily was struck by the "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) about that time last night, reducing access to it and to the PAS website as well.

"The technical team is working hard to manage the attacks and has successfully reduced the damage, allowing Harakah Daily to strive on," said the report.

Several alternative web portals have been set up by the management of Harakah Daily and PAS for the members of the public to access the sites for reports on tomorrow's Sarawak state election.

These reports can, now at least, be accessed at harakahdaily.net, myharakah.net and harakah.net.my .

For access to the PAS party portal, viewers can go to pas.org.my, parti-pas.org and parti-islam.org .

Sarawak Report founder: 'Attacks building up'

"Any inconvenience caused is regretted. We are taking further steps to address this problem," said the statement from the portal's IT technical team.

Malaysiakini

was attacked on Tuesday, after Sarawak Report was hit on April 10.

Sarawak Report , which has been critical of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, was shut down in an assault similar to the one on Malaysiakini .

According to its founder Clare Rewcastle Brown ( right ), the attacks have been building up, with interruptions over the previous week, culminating in a concerted attack last weekend.

Rewcastle explained that web experts said the DSoS attack was similar to that which at one time brought down the Wikileaks site.

In a DDoS attack, multiple ‘bots', or programmes running on servers or personal computers in different countries, are used to bombard a site server with multiple requests to view the site.

These ‘bots' will repeat requests for data so many times that they flood the server, jamming its ability to respond.

Sarawak Report has now moved to this new address, while for Malaysiakini , our alternative website at Wordpress can be accessed for free.