AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT WEBSITES ATTACKED

February 10, 2010

A group of hackers connected with the anti-Scientology group Anonymous this morning launched a broad attack on Australian government websites. They are protesting against forthcoming internet filtering legislation and the perceived censorship in pornography of small-breasted women (who are thought to be under age) and female ejaculation also known as squirting and gushing.

A number of government websites were taken down this morning and the hackers have promised to follow up by spamming government offices with pornographic emails, faxes and prank phone calls. The Attorney-General’s department this morning confirmed the attacks and said the Department of Defence Cyber Security Operations Centre was monitoring the situation.

A spokeswoman for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy said the attacks were not a legitimate form of political statement. They were “totally irresponsible and potentially deny services to the Australian public”. The attacks, organised under the banner “Operation: Titstorm”, come five months after hackers connected with the same group briefly brought down the Prime Minister’s website. At the time the hackers said they would regroup and launch new attacks.

Flyers distributed to recruit participants for the operation said the denial of service attacks on government servers would begin at 8am today. It is not clear how many other sites were targeted but it appears a wide range of government servers were flooded with traffic.

Anonymous is a loose group of anonymous online pranksters from around the world who come together to work towards certain goals, such as the eradication of the Church of Scientology or blocking perceived threats to internet freedom. It is not clear if the same members of the group involved in attacks on Scientology participated in the attacks on government websites.

The attacks come as the government prepares to introduce its controversial mandatory internet filtering legislation and just after the Australian sex industry claimed porn films were being banned from sale in Australia because they featured small-breasted women and female ejaculation.

In the flyer recruiting people for the attacks, Anonymous said the attacks on the websites would be followed by “a shitstorm of porn email, fax spam, black faxes and prank phone calls to government offices (emails/faxes should focus on small-breasted porn, cartoon porn and female ejaculation, the three types banned so far)”.

Anti-censorship groups in Australia, including stopinternetcensorship.org and the System Administrators Guild of Australia, have condemned the attacks, saying it hurts their cause. “It would be much more helpful for these people to put their efforts behind legitimate action to stop this ineffective and inefficient attempt at censorship by the Australian government,” said Stop Internet Censorship co-founder Nicholas Perkins.

Hackers are routinely demonized in the media as being anti-social geeks who lock themselves away from the ‘real world’. But as we witnessed with the Climategate email scandal they can turn their hand to worthwhile causes and blow wide open the absolute corruption and lies at the highest level of society and which is conveniently ignored by the mainstream media