The malaysiakini website came under a 'denial of service' attack at about 10am today, preventing readers from accessing the site for about two hours.

A 'denial of service' attack takes the form of using computers to generate a very large number of requests for pages off a particular website, making it inaccessible for legitimate users.

According to malaysiakini web programmer Danny Hong, the IP address of the hacker was traced to the Asia Pacific Institute of Information Technology (APIIT) - a top IT school in Kuala Lumpur - which uses Internet service provider MaxisNet service.

IP addresses are identity tags given to the Internet user gateways by telecommunication companies such as MaxisNet.

Hong and his colleague Arif Abdullah immediately contacted MaxisNet, but were given the run-around for almost two hours.

"It wasn't until I told them that I would lodge a police report on the matter that they said they needed 15 minutes to trace the source of the attack. And they did get back to me soon after," said Arif.

When contacted for comment, MaxisNet explained that the delay was due to its customer service staff's lack of experience on handling such cases as they were rare.

After being informed on source of the attack, Hong contacted the college but officials there told him that due to the congested traffic, they were unable to pinpoint the source.

However, the college immediately shut down the server from which traffic was heading towards malaysiakini.

Previous attacks

APIIT systems engineer Michael Low said their system could have been hacked as well when quizzed on the incident.

"We have a security system called the 'Firewall' and it has internal and external zones. The external zone is for the general public to access as we have a website for them. And this is the vulnerable spot of the security system," he explained.

He added that the heavy traffic flow made tracing the culprit difficult as hackers normally use high-traffic volume to cover their tracks.

However, Low stressed that the college was aggressively tracing the culprit and would inform malaysiakini once there was any information.

A police report on the attack will be made by malaysiakini tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Hong said this was not the first time that the online media organisation had encountered such attacks, which usually occurred during important news events.

"I think these attacks were launched to stop us from breaking important news. For example, when we heard that Dr Mahathir Mohamad was stepping down as prime minister, our system was also attacked," he added.

In earlier attacks, malaysiakini had been successful in nabbing one of the culprits three years ago.

The student hacker, who was traced all the way to University of British Columbia in Canada, was eventually punished by the authorities.

Malaysiakini is currently in the process of creating a series of mirror sites in preparation for the upcoming general election.