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Porn Supporters Bring Down Australian Govt Websites

by Gopalan on Feb 10 2010 10:59 AM

Porn supporters have attacked two prominent Australian government websites to protest a move to introduce an Internet fitlering scheme.

The Attorney-General’s office said this afternoon that the group had knocked the website of the Australian Parliament House offline this morning for approximately 50 minutes due to a distributed denial of service attack by the group. However, at the time of writing, the site was still unavailable.

A spokesperson for the department confirmed that Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy had also been suffering a “degraded service” on its website.

The operation, named Titstorm, was launched in a bid to tell the Federal Government its mandatory ISP-level filtering plan was not wanted.

"The Australian Government will learn that one does not mess with our porn. No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason," the group said in a media statement.

In addition to the attacks on government servers, loose-knit confederation of internet activists, organizing themselves under the banner “Anonymous,” have talked on its internet relay chat room about tying up the parliamentary offices with prank calls, emails full of pornography and small-breasted women. The group has also been encouraging users to send "black faxes", which are pages of solid black tone, with the aim to waste the recipient's ink.

The group has also been checking the status of government websites and urging each other to strike harder to gain media publicity. "KEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP APH DOWN," said one user on the chat with the handle An0nym0us.

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“Australian Government agencies identified as potential targets by ‘Anonymous’ were briefed in advance and were provided with suggested mitigation strategies,” said the spokesperson for Attorney-General Robert McLelland. “The Department of Defence Cyber Security Operations Centre continues to monitor the situation.”

It’s not the first time Anonymous has attacked government websites; in September last year, the group, which has achieved notoriety for its attacks against the Church of Scientology, temporarily took down several Australian Government websites, including the website of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

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