Anonymous Takes Down Australian Parliament and Other Government Websites with Distributed Denial of Service Attack
February 10th, 2010Via: AFP:
A shadowy group of cyber-activists blocked key Australian government websites on Wednesday to protest against controversial plans to filter the Internet.
The main government website, www.australia.gov.au, and parliament’s www.aph.gov.au were both affected along with the sites for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
Web activists had earlier warned the sites would be blocked under what they called “Operation: Titstorm”, and threatened to follow up with “porn email, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices”.
The campaign, by the anti-Scientology group Anonymous, follows Conroy’s announcement in December that Australia would block access to sites featuring material such as rape, drug use, bestiality and child sex abuse.
“The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn,” Anonymous said in an email sent to AFP.
“No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason,” it said.
A spokeswoman for Conroy defended the new filter measures and denounced the cyber-attacks.
“Denial-of-service attacks on government websites are totally irresponsible and potentially deny services to the Australian public,” the official said.
“The government welcomes public debate on the merits of ISP (Internet service provider) filtering, but denial-of-service attacks are not a legitimate form of political statement.”
The attorney-general’s department said government experts were working to contain the problem.
“Australian government agencies identified as potential targets by ‘Anonymous’ were briefed in advance and were provided with suggested mitigation strategies,” a spokesman said, without giving further details.
Internet groups and the pornography industry have opposed the filter, while search engine Google says it could block harmless material on areas of legitimate debate such as euthanasia, sexuality and terrorism.
Anonymous, known for its campaign against the Church of Scientology, could not immediately be reached for further comment.
What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
In my mind, reciprocity is one of the cornerstones of fairness or justice. It’s telling how upset “authorities” become when they’re subjected to the same treatment (via different means, perhaps)which they so boldly claim the right to perpetrate on others.
Anonymous… What a perfect agent provocateur, couldn’t be better. Get a couple gov’t agents to hack into whatever they feel will make the daily news, then claim that they are “web activists”. Then they’ve got plenty of reason to run with the laws that the ‘attacks’ were supposed to be protesting against.
This is great –
“Anonymous, known for its campaign against the Church of Scientology, could not immediately be reached for further comment.”
Yeah, they’ll get their PR agent right on it.
Why do we think this is so damn funny…