Malaysiakini has remained online despite unrelenting denial-of-service attacks, with its new servers able to ride out the cyber-assaults - for now.
Nevertheless, Malaysiakini will continue to use Wordpress and Google as alternate platforms should our site go down again in the run-up to Saturday's Sarawak election.
The attacks, which began on Tuesday, crippled Malaysiakini 's 24-server infrastructure in TM and Jaring data centres.
The attack has also been extended to new servers Malaysiakini brought online in the United States and elsewhere.
Given the heavy traffic, Malaysiakini is running on a ‘lean mode’ with a stripped-down, graphic-light frontpage.
In the wake of these attacks, Malaysiakini has received a wave of public support.
"We've been receiving numerous phone calls and emails urging us to persevere," said Malaysiakini CEO Premesh Chandran.
"Readers have also been very generous in making donations to Malaysiakini and we thank them for their support," he added.
Over the next few days, Malaysiakini will be deploying more servers to cope with the increased traffic.
"We expect more than one million people to follow the Sarawak election results live on Saturday. We are preparing as much capacity as possible to support the traffic,” said Premesh.
He said some Malaysiakin i services remained unaccessible, such as the popular Comments section.
"We apologise to all our subscribers for their inability to express their views to Malaysiakini through the Comments section. As a temporary measure, we are allowing our Facebook fans to post comments."
Sarawak Report suffers further attacks
In a related development, Sarawak Report , a website critical of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, has encountered further attacks after it was brought down on Sunday.
“The attack on Sarawak Report has been ‘unprecedented’, according to one of the largest hosting companies in the world, which has been forced to drop our site in order to continue operations,” lamented website founder Clare Rewcastle.
“We suffered yet another distributed denial of service attack last night. It happened around 8pm UK time after a build-up over a number of hours. This was far larger than the previous attacks over the weekend, and separate to a hacking attack the day before.”
Rewcastle said the website host, a major company in the US, said this was “something that went above what they know”.
According to her, a senior engineer from the hosting company said it was an unprecedented denial-of-service attack against the website, which was “so big that it was affecting their whole server infrastructure”.
“Therefore, we were kindly asked not to host our website with them again because they cannot handle such levels of attack,” she told Malaysiakini .
“We are now up in a number of capacities, including Wordpress. It is noted that Wordpress, which is considered the world's rock-solid hosting site, reported that for the first time yesterday they were nearly brought down by a hacking attack.”
