PM's website attacked in protest

The website of the Prime Minister and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) were the subject of an attack yesterday, in support of protest against the Government’s internet filtering program.

This type of attack is called a Denial of Service attack, where hackers flood a website with traffic causing the website to go down. This is a regular occurrence across the internet, but this time the motivation was political and specifically targeted at both the Prime Minister who government introduced the policy, and the ACMA who are administering the internet filtering trials.

It is reported that the attack occurred shortly after 7pm AEST, which took the affected websites off line for a short period of time, both sites now appear to be operating normally.

The attack allegedly carried out by the hacker known as ‘Anonymous’, was labelled as juvenile by Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today.

The attack demonstrates how deeply unpopular the government’s planned internet filtering is within the community. This time most have been surprised at what lengths protesters are prepared to go to, to make their point. Is this just the start ?