The coalition for clean and fair elections Bersih claimed that its website was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack for 13 hours yesterday.

Referring to charts of network traffic, it said the “attack” lasted from 2pm on April 17 to 3am the next day, and had caused access issues from 2pm on April 18.

NONE “The attack caused a load of an average one million requests per hour, which is more than 100 times the traffic a typical news portal like Malaysia Today would have,” Bersih said.

Charts attached to the press statements showed traffic surge to about 90 mega bits per second, far surpassing the website usual traffic of about one or two mega bits per second.

The high traffic dropped suddenly at about 5pm on April 17, with the “attack” persisting while the problem was being mitigated.

NONE A smaller surge of traffic was observed at around 3am on April 18 at about 65 mega bits per second.

Bersih believes the “attack” is a way to silence its efforts to create awareness on electoral reform and the promote the sit-in at Dataran Merdeka on April 28.

NONE “Such online attacks to silence the right to expression will fail miserably as Malaysians from all walks of life march towards freedom. Nothing will stop the largest sit-in in Malaysia’s history on April 28,” it said defiantly.

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

The bots will repeat the request for data so many times they flood the server beyond its ability to respond.