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By Jeremy Wagstaff and Timothy Mclaughlin
SINGAPORE/YANGON, Feb 25 (Reuters) — Burmese hackers say they have attacked Thai government websites since early January and stolen data, part of a long-running, broader campaign against those critical of Myanmar's government.
The Blink Hacker Group said in Facebook posts and in an email interview that its attacks were in retaliation for Thailand sentencing two Burmese to death for the murder of two British backpackers late last year.
The group said it posted online data it took from websites of the Thai prison agency and justice ministry, saying databases from any government websites it hacked «should be made public.»
Thai police said they had yet to determine who was behind the attacks, but denied those responsible were from Myanmar.
Dechnarong Suthicharnbancha, a spokesperson for the Royal Thai Police, said there had been little impact from the attacks on police websites. «It was only a nuisance. We got the websites running again with no trouble at all.»
The attacks do, though, mark an escalation in computer hacking since Myanmar opened up to foreign investment and ended decades of military rule in 2011, researchers say.
Nationalist attacks on other countries' websites are not new, but those by Myanmar-based groups have increased and have also hit domestic media perceived to be critical of government policies or supportive of Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority.
The Blink Hacker Group said it targeted independent media websites Irrawaddy and Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) «because we believe that media should not (be) use(d) for propaganda.»
Spokesmen for both media sites confirmed they had been hacked.

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Tord Lundstroem, a Swedish researcher who works for a company that hosts independent media websites including Irrawaddy, said domain hosting records linked the Blink Hacker Group and others to Yangon-based companies selling web design and security services, and the hacker groups' Facebook activity indicated informal links to people with military backgrounds.
Lundstroem said hackers were better organised and more sophisticated, noting that servers and email accounts at Irrawaddy and DVB had been penetrated around the time of last November's landmark democratic election in Myanmar — though he said these attacks were not the work of the Blink Hacker Group.
The Blink Hacker Group said it previously had been ready to work with Myanmar's military to help «build a better Internet» but had received no response. It said none of its 20 members were in the military.
Min Ko Ko of Creatigon, a web development company, said he belonged to a group called Myanmar Hackers Unite4M and was founder of Myanmar Security Forum, but was not a hacker. The founder of IT firm Cyber Wings Asia, Yan Naing Myint, said his company had provided hosting for the Blink Hacker Group's website, but neither he nor his business were involved in the group's activities or in hacking.
Myanmar government spokesman Ye Htut laughed off claims that the military had cyber war units, saying «I think people sometimes overestimate the capacity of the Myanmar military.» (Reporting by Jeremy Wagstaff and Timothy Mclaughlin, with additional reporting by Aukkarapon Niyomyat and Patpicha Tanakasempipat in Bangkok; Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

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By Jemima Kelly
LONDON, Jan 25 (Reuters) — The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a provider of back-office services to the financial sector, called on Monday for industry-wide collaboration on blockchain technology, saying it could make post-trade processes faster and more efficient.

Blockchain technology — or distributed ledger technology, as the DTCC and other financiers prefers to call it — underpins bitcoin, a controversial web-based «cryptocurrency». It is a massive ledger of every bitcoin transaction made, which is verified and shared by a global network of computers.

But the data that can be secured by the blockchain need not be restricted to bitcoin transactions. Any two parties could use it to exchange information or assets, within minutes and with no need for a central authority to verify it.
The International Monetary Fund said in a research paper last week that blockchain technology could pose a serious challenge to the business models of established financial system, a view shared by the Bank for International Settlements [.

In a white paper published on Monday, the DTCC said the technology could «modernize, streamline and simplify the siloed design of the financial industry infrastructure and address certain limitations of the current post-trade process».
The DTCC, a financial services group controlled by investment banks, said blockchain technology could speed up and simplify trade and contract validation, the issuance of assets and securities, and settlement and clearing processes.

«The industry has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to re-imagine and modernize its infrastructure to resolve long-standing operational challenges,» said DTCC CEO Michael Bodson.
The DTCC did, however, caution that the technology is still immature and, in its current form, has limited scale.
The group recently invested in Digital Asset Holdings LLC, a blockchain start-up aimed at the financial services industry and run by former JPMorgan banker Blythe Masters.

Last week New-York based R3 CEV, which calls itself a «financial technology innovation company», said that 11 banks in a global consortium set up by R3 last year had successfully tested a blockchain-based trading system that could make trading much faster and cheaper. (Reporting By Jemima Kelly, editing by Larry King)

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