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.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
An Australian arm of the loose-knit hacking group Anonymous announced its attack via its Twitter account shortly after 10am this morning. "Server. http://www.asio.gov.au has been down for some time now, And will be for the rest of the day!" the OperationAustralia account stated.
ASIO's website was down for at least half an hour this morning and now either loads slowly or doesn't work at all. It said in a statement that it was "aware that there may have been some technical issues" with its site, adding "ASIO's public website does not host any classified information and any disruption would not represent a risk to ASIO's business."
Over the past week Anonymous' twitter account has been boasting it will 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 August 8.
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 recently took data and customer records belonging to business telco AAPT from a data centre and published it on a website. Anonymous wanted to to highlight the dangers of a proposal to force telcos to store every Australian's web history for up to two years.
The Privacy Commissioner launched an investigation into the leak earlier this week.
It comes as Fairfax Media reported today that government had put the web spy proposal on the back burner, delaying it until after the next federal election.
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. Anonymous did not gain access to any of ASIO's information, it simply stopped the website from loading.
