|
|
|
Date: August 11 2012
The notorious hacking group Anonymous crippled a computer server at the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, and claimed the agency's website would be unavailable for the rest of the day.
An Australian arm of the loose-knit hacking group announced its attack via its Twitter account shortly after 10am yesterday. ''Server http://www.asio.gov.au has been down for some time now and will be for the rest of the day!'' the account stated.
ASIO's website was down for at least half an hour yesterday morning and last night either worked, loaded slowly or didn't work at all. The spy agency said in a statement that it was ''aware that there may have been some technical issues'' with its site, adding that it did ''not host any classified information [on it] and any disruption would not represent a risk to ASIO's business''.
Over the past week, Anonymous' Australian Twitter account has been boasting it would attack the ASIO website and that of Defence Signals Directorate. ''The anonymous Operation Australia hackers have today again been busy with further attacks on the ASIO and DSD website,'' Anonymous Australia wrote on Wednesday.
A number of other distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and website defacements have been levelled at some 10 government agencies in the past month. The group also recently took data and customer records belonging to business telco AAPT from a data centre and published it on a website. Anonymous conducted the attack because it wanted to highlight the dangers of a proposal to force telcos to store every Australian's web history for up to two years.
Today's attack was also done in protest of the proposal.
The Privacy Commissioner launched an investigation into the AAPT leak earlier this week.
Fairfax Media reported yesterday that the federal government had put the web spy proposal on the back-burner, delaying it until after the next federal election.
An Anonymous user in an internet relay chat, believed to be where the hackers have been co-ordinating the attacks on Australian websites, said the attack on ASIO's site would cease at 10pm last night. They claimed a ''minor victory'' after the web spy proposal was put on the back-burner by Attorney-General Nicola Roxon, saying Ms Roxon ''didn't want the attention leading up to the election''.
''Attacks may ease up,'' they said, ''[but] I cannot say no more attacks will continue.
''We will continue to watch the situation. The operation had only just started really.
''[There] was a lot more heat to bring if she didn't back down.
''But [we] will continue to keep an eye on the Australian government.''
Ms Roxon has previously urged interested parties to avoid ''hysteria'' and contribute to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security inquiry instead. But the Anonymous group member said hysteria was needed to prompt change.
''Sometimes you need a bit of organised hysteria to get a reaction with an apathetic public,'' the source said.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.
[ Canberra Times | Text-only index]