The Australian Government's websites have had a rocky history, and similar to their attack in March of last year, they've been hit again - but this time, the scale is massive.
Manifested by the infamous internet group Anonymous, their 'Operation: Titstorm' funneled anger over the internet filtering and other actions taken by the government, such as the Clean Feed.
Anonymous began their attack by blasting the government's main website and the parliament site (currently down as of 11:30AM) with requests, reaching up to 7.5 million hits per second at peak, and bringing the servers down for over an hour with sporadic access for some time afterwards.
Their attack hit the real world too, with politicians receiving emails, calls and faxes that included porn in many different flavours, disrupting and affecting many people.
While their attack definitely grabbed some attention for Anonymous, it ultimately does nothing for the actual fight to concrete our freedom of choice on the internet - instead generating only a few lulz.
Check out the flyer for Operation Titstorm here:
Update @ 12PM: The Australian Sex Party have denied their cooperation or involvement with Operation: Titstorm in a press release:
The Australian Sex Party has denied any involvement in the recent cyber attacks on Parliament House and other government department web sites . The campaign, dubbed ‘Operation Titstorm' by its creators, appeared to spring from a Sex Party media release last week that reported the banning of women with small breasts from adult magazines by Australian censorship authorities.
Party President Fiona Patten said that bringing logical perspectives to the area of internet censorship was not always easy but the Sex Party used political lobbying and rational arguments to win its wars. "Senator Conroy however uses unfair tactics by continuing to ban the Australian Sex Party website from within his own department" she said. "Despite letters of protest about the unconstitutional nature of such bans he refuses to budge. These bans have now spread to state government departments with the Victorian Dept of Infrastructure the latest government agency to ban access to the sex party's site".
