Hackers cripple Aussie intelligence website

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 Anonymous announced its attack via its Twitter account shortly after 10am (12pm NZT) this morning. "Server. Asio.gov.au has been down for some time now, And will be for the rest of the day!" the OperationAustralia account stated.

Comment is being sought from ASIO. Its website was down for at least half an hour this morning. It now either loads slowly or doesn't work at all.

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 Pro