February 2010 Australian cyberattacks

Last updated

Operation Titstorm
Operation titstorm.jpg
A flyer for Operation Titstorm
DateFebruary 2010
Location
Internet and Australia
Methods spam, street protests, denial-of-service attacks
Resulted inProposed laws failed to go through
Parties

The February 2010 Australian cyberattacks were a series of denial-of-service attacks conducted by the Anonymous online community against the Australian government in response to proposed web censorship regulations. [1] Operation Titstorm was the name given to the cyber attacks by the perpetrators. They resulted in lapses of access to government websites on 10 and 11 February 2010. This was accompanied by emails, faxes, and phone calls harassing government offices. The actual size of the attack and number of perpetrators involved is unknown but it was estimated that the number of systems involved ranged from the hundreds to the thousands. The amount of traffic caused disruption on multiple government websites.

Contents

Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy proposed the regulations that would mainly filter sites with pornographic content. Various groups advocating uncensored access to the Internet, along with companies like Google and Yahoo!, object to the proposed filter. A spokesperson for Conroy said that the actions were not a legitimate form of protest and called it irresponsible. The attacks also drew criticism from other filter protest groups. The initial stage was followed by small in-person protests on 20 February that were called "Project Freeweb".

Background

Stephen Conroy StephenConroy.jpg
Stephen Conroy

The attack began as a protest responding to a plan by Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy that would require internet service providers to block Australian users from accessing illegal and what the government deemed as "unwanted" content. [2] Websites to be blocked feature pornography showing rape, bestiality, child sex abuse, small-breasted women (who may appear under the legal age), and female ejaculation. Drawn depictions of such acts are included in the proposal. [3] The proposed filter also includes gambling sites along with others showing drug use. [4] A leaked version of the proposed blacklist (also referred to as the "refused classification" or "RC" list) also showed sites that did not include adult content. The name "Operation Titstorm" was in reference to the material that would be censored. [5]

Google has questioned the proposal, saying the prohibitions would be too broad. [2] [5] It is strongly opposed by free speech groups. A poll conducted by McNair Ingenuity Research for the Hungry Beast television program found that 80% of their 1,000 respondents were in favour of the concept of the plan. [6] The survey also found that 91% were concerned about the government's intent to keep the list of filtered websites a secret. [7]

The Department of Defence's Cyber Security Operations Centre discovered the attack was coming on 5 February. [8] A statement released by Anonymous to the press two days before the attack said, "No government should have the right to refuse its citizens access to information solely because they perceive it to be 'unwanted'." It went on to read, "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". [9] [10] Anonymous had previously garnered media attention with protests against Church of Scientology (Project Chanology) and the Iranian government. [11] In September 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's website was hacked in a similar protest to proposed web censorship reforms. [6]

Attacks

Flyers distributed to recruit participants said the attack was to begin at 8 pm AEST on 10 February. [10] On that day, government websites were targeted by denial-of-service attacks. The Communications Department said the hackers had not infiltrated government security, but had instead swamped government computer servers. [6] Sites were left unavailable for sporadic periods throughout the attack. At one point, the Australian Parliament's website was offline for about two days due to the high volume of requests. [12] Rudd's government site was also inaccessible for some time. As a primary target, the Communications Department also received a large amount of traffic. Government offices were also flooded with e-mail spam, junk faxes, and prank phone calls. [3] The Prime Minister's homepage was vandalized with pornographic images. [9] The flyer released before the attack called for the faxes to focus on cartoon pornography, female ejaculation, and small-breasted pornography. [13] [14]

Reports of the actual size of the attack have varied. One cyber security expert described the attacks as "the equivalent of parking a truck across the driveway of a shopping centre". [15] A firm marketing security technology said that the peak of the attack was a relatively low 16.84 megabits per second. [3] One writer described the 7.5 million requests per second that initially brought down the Parliament website as "massive". [2] The site usually only receives a few hundred per second. [10] It appears that botnets made up of compromised computers were not used. [3] Estimates of the number of attacking systems involved have ranged from hundreds to thousands. [4] [11]

Response

A spokeswoman for Conroy said such attacks were not a legitimate political protest. According to her, they were "totally irresponsible and potentially deny services to the Australian public". [16] The Systems Administrators Guild of Australia said that it "condemned DDoS attacks as the wrong way to express disagreement with the proposed law". [17] Anti-censorship groups criticised the attacks, saying they hurt their cause. [11] [16] A purported spokesperson for the attackers recommended that the wider Australian public protest the filter by signing the petition of Electronic Frontiers Australia. [18]

Anonymous coordinated a second phase with small protests outside the Parliament House in Canberra and in major cities throughout Australia on 20 February. Additional demonstrations were held at some of the country's embassies overseas. [17] The organizers called the follow-up protests "Project Freeweb" to differentiate them from the criticised cyber attacks. [19]

Several supporters of the attack later said on a messageboard that taking down websites was not enough to convince the government to back down on the web filtering policy and called for violence. Others disagreed with such actions and proposed launching an additional attack on a popular government site. A spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia said he believed there was no real intention or capacity to follow through with any of the violent threats. [20]

The attack also resulted in criticism of Australia's terrorism laws from The University of New South Wales Law Journal. [1] One writer wrote that the provisions leave "no place for legitimate acts of online protest, or at least sets the penalty far too high for relatively minor cyber-vandalism". [21]

An Australian teenager was charged with four counts of inciting other hackers to impair electronic communications and two of unauthorised access to restricted data for his role in the attack. He was ordered to pay a bond instead of being convicted after pleading guilty and showing good behaviour. [22]

In July 2010, Conroy delayed implementing the plan pending a 12-month review into how refused classification content was rated. The proposal is not expected to go forward due to the opposition from The Coalition and the Greens. Internet service providers Telstra and Optus have both agreed to voluntarily block some content. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

An Internet filter is software that restricts or controls the content an Internet user is capable to access, especially when utilized to restrict material delivered over the Internet via the Web, Email, or other means. Such restrictions can be applied at various levels: a government can attempt to apply them nationwide, or they can, for example, be applied by an Internet service provider to its clients, by an employer to its personnel, by a school to its students, by a library to its visitors, by a parent to a child's computer, or by an individual user to their own computers. The motive is often to prevent access to content which the computer's owner(s) or other authorities may consider objectionable. When imposed without the consent of the user, content control can be characterised as a form of internet censorship. Some filter software includes time control functions that empowers parents to set the amount of time that child may spend accessing the Internet or playing games or other computer activities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hacktivism</span> Computer-based activities as a means of protest

Internet activism, hacktivism, or hactivism, is the use of computer-based techniques such as hacking as a form of civil disobedience to promote a political agenda or social change. With roots in hacker culture and hacker ethics, its ends are often related to free speech, human rights, or freedom of information movements.

Although Freedom House considers Australia to have both freedom of speech and a free and independent media, certain subject-matter is subject to various forms of government censorship. These include matters of national security, judicial non-publication or suppression orders, defamation law, the federal Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth), film and literature classification, and advertising restrictions.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) is an Australian government statutory authority within the Communications portfolio. ACMA was formed on 1 July 2005 with the merger of the Australian Broadcasting Authority and the Australian Communications Authority.

Internet censorship in Tunisia significantly decreased in January 2011, following the ouster of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, as the new acting government removed filters on social networking sites such as YouTube.

Internet censorship in Australia is enforced by both the country's criminal law as well as voluntarily enacted by internet service providers. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has the power to enforce content restrictions on Internet content hosted within Australia, and maintain a blocklist of overseas websites which is then provided for use in filtering software. The restrictions focus primarily on child pornography, sexual violence, and other illegal activities, compiled as a result of a consumer complaints process.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Conroy</span> Australian former politician

Stephen Michael Conroy is an Australian former politician who was an Australian Labor Party member of the Senate from 1996 to 2016, representing the state of Victoria. He served as a minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments. He resigned from the Senate in September 2016. He has since worked as a lobbyist, political commentator and football administrator.

Censorship in South Korea is implemented by various laws that were included in the constitution as well as acts passed by the National Assembly over the decades since 1948. These include the National Security Act, whereby the government may limit the expression of ideas that it perceives "praise or incite the activities of anti-state individuals or groups". Censorship was particularly severe during the country's authoritarian era, with freedom of expression being non-existent, which lasted from 1948 to 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship in India</span> Overview of Internet censorship in India

Internet censorship in India is done by both central and state governments. DNS filtering and educating service users in suggested usages is an active strategy and government policy to regulate and block access to Internet content on a large scale. Measures for removing content at the request of content creators through court orders have also become more common in recent years. Initiating a mass surveillance government project like Golden Shield Project is an alternative that has been discussed over the years by government bodies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship</span> Legal control of the internet

Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains but exceptionally may extend to all Internet resources located outside the jurisdiction of the censoring state. Internet censorship may also put restrictions on what information can be made internet accessible. Organizations providing internet access – such as schools and libraries – may choose to preclude access to material that they consider undesirable, offensive, age-inappropriate or even illegal, and regard this as ethical behavior rather than censorship. Individuals and organizations may engage in self-censorship of material they publish, for moral, religious, or business reasons, to conform to societal norms, political views, due to intimidation, or out of fear of legal or other consequences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anonymous (hacker group)</span> Decentralized hacktivist group

Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Payback</span> Series of cyberattacks conducted by Anonymous

Operation Payback was a coordinated, decentralized group of attacks on high-profile opponents of Internet piracy by Internet activists using the "Anonymous" moniker. Operation Payback started as retaliation to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on torrent sites; piracy proponents then decided to launch DDoS attacks on piracy opponents. The initial reaction snowballed into a wave of attacks on major pro-copyright and anti-piracy organizations, law firms, and individuals. The Motion Picture Association of America, the Pirate Party UK and United States Pirate Party criticised the attacks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship in South Korea</span> Overview of Internet censorship in South Korea

Internet censorship in South Korea is prevalent, and contains some unique elements such as the blocking of pro-North Korea websites, and to a lesser extent, Japanese websites, which led to it being categorized as "pervasive" in the conflict/security area by OpenNet Initiative. South Korea is also one of the few developed countries where pornography is largely illegal, with the exception of social media websites which are a common source of legal pornography in the country. Any and all material deemed "harmful" or subversive by the state is censored. The country also has a "cyber defamation law", which allow the police to crack down on comments deemed "hateful" without any reports from victims, with citizens being sentenced for such offenses.

There is medium internet censorship in France, including limited filtering of child pornography, laws against websites that promote terrorism or racial hatred, and attempts to protect copyright. The "Freedom on the Net" report by Freedom House has consistently listed France as a country with Internet freedom. Its global ranking was 6 in 2013 and 12 in 2017. A sharp decline in its score, second only to Libya was noted in 2015 and attributed to "problematic policies adopted in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, such as restrictions on content that could be seen as 'apology for terrorism,' prosecutions of users, and significantly increased surveillance."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pornography in Pakistan</span> Overview of pornography in Pakistan

Pornography in Pakistan is subject to several legal provisions. The Government of Pakistan has placed ban on internet websites containing such material since November 2011. Major pornography website are already barred in Pakistan. In 2016, it was reported that government of Pakistan ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Pakistan to block more than 400,000 websites which contained pornographic content. Later in 2019, around 800,000 additional website containing pornographic content were banned by the Pakistan Telecom Authority on the order of government of Pakistan.

Anonymous is a decentralized virtual community. They are commonly referred to as an internet-based collective of hacktivists whose goals, like its organization, are decentralized. Anonymous seeks mass awareness and revolution against what the organization perceives as corrupt entities, while attempting to maintain anonymity. Anonymous has had a hacktivist impact. This is a timeline of activities reported to be carried out by the group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Hidden Wiki</span> Defunct Tor wiki

The Hidden Wiki was a dark web MediaWiki wiki operating as a Tor hidden service that could be anonymously edited after registering on the site. The main page served as a directory of links to other .onion sites.

<i>We Are Legion</i> 2012 American film

We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists is a 2012 documentary film about the workings and beliefs of the self-described "hacktivist" collective, Anonymous.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2013 Singapore cyberattacks</span> Cyberattacks done on Singaporean websites

The 2013 Singapore cyberattacks were a series of cyberattacks initiated by the hacktivist organisation Anonymous, conducted partly in response to web censorship regulations in Singapore. A member of Anonymous, known by the online handle "The Messiah", claimed responsibility for spearheading the attacks. On 12 November 2013, James Raj was charged in a Singapore court as the alleged "Messiah".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet censorship and surveillance in Oceania</span> Overview about the Internet censorship and surveillance in Oceania

This list of Internet censorship and surveillance in Oceania provides information on the types and levels of Internet censorship and surveillance that is occurring in countries in Oceania.

References

  1. 1 2 Hardy, Keiran. "Operation Titstorm: hacktivism or cyber-terrorism?". The University of New South Wales Law Journal. 33 (2). Australia: 474–502. ISSN   0313-0096.
  2. 1 2 3 Gross, Grant (10 February 2010). "Australian Parliament Web Site Attacked". PC World . IDG News. Archived from the original on 12 February 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Leyden, John (11 February 2010). "Aussie anti-censor attacks strafe gov websites". The Register . Retrieved 12 February 2010.
  4. 1 2 "Australia cyber attacks could last 'months': hackers". Agence France-Presse. 11 February 2010. Archived from the original on 17 February 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  5. 1 2 Kamenev, Marina (16 June 2010). "First, China. Next: the Great Firewall of... Australia?". Time. Archived from the original on 17 June 2010. Retrieved 3 August 2010.
  6. 1 2 3 "Hackers protesting against a proposed internet filter that targets pornography shut down Federal Government website". Herald Sun . 10 February 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  7. "Why Conroy loves porn". The Sydney Morning Herald . 19 February 2010. Archived from the original on 20 February 2010. Retrieved 19 February 2010.
  8. "Hackers attack AU websites to protest censorship". International Business Times. 10 February 2010. Archived from the original on 13 February 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  9. 1 2 Marks, Kathy (11 February 2010). "Operation Titstorm – Hackers declare war on Aussie". The New Zealand Herald . Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  10. 1 2 3 Kravets, David (10 February 2010). "Anonymous Unfurls 'Operation Titstorm'". Wired . Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  11. 1 2 3 Kleinman, Zoe (12 February 2010). "Cyber attacks against Australia 'will continue'". BBC News. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  12. "Australia cyber attacks could last 'months': hackers". The Sydney Morning Herald. 11 February 2010. Archived from the original on 12 February 2010. Retrieved 11 February 2010.
  13. Ragan, Steve (10 February 2010). "Anonymous issues ultimatum to Australian government". The Tech Herald. Archived from the original on 17 July 2011. Retrieved 1 March 2011.
  14. Moses, Asher (10 February 2010). "Operation Titstorm hackers strike Australia". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 4 November 2013.
  15. Marks, Kathy (11 February 2010). ""Operation Titstorm" hackers declare cyber war on Australia". The Independent . Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  16. 1 2 "Hacker raid condemned". The Age . 11 February 2010. Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  17. 1 2 Raywood, Dan (15 February 2010). "Australia prepares for week of protest against web filters after the Anonymous group hit key websites last week". SC Magazine. Haymarket Group . Retrieved 19 February 2010.
  18. LeMay, Renai (12 February 2010). "Anonymous says Titstorm beats a petition". Ziff Davis . Retrieved 13 February 2010.
  19. LeMay, Renai (15 February 2010). "Anonymous' Titstorm moves to offline protest". Ziff Davis . Retrieved 15 February 2010.
  20. Moses, Asher (25 March 2010). "Conroy's net gag sparks assassination and bomb plot chatter". Brisbane Times. Retrieved 3 March 2010.
  21. Vaile, David. "Forward". The University of New South Wales Law Journal. 33 (2). Australia: 428. ISSN   0313-0096. Keiran Hardy assesses Operation Titstorm' – an online protest against Australia's proposed internet filter – as an act of terrorism, arguing that the embarrassing (for the federal police) but essentially harmless offensive, is caught by Commonwealth terrorism provisions, so widely drafted are these offences borne in the often scrutiny-free territory of the 'war on terror'.11 This is problematic, he argues, because it leaves no place for legitimate acts of online protest, or at least sets the penalty far too high for relatively minor cybervandalism.
  22. Ross, Norrie (7 December 2010). "Steve Slayo avoids jail term after inciting hack attack on Federal Government". Herald Sun. Retrieved 1 March 2011.
  23. Foo, Fran (7 September 2010). "ISP filter could be buried". The Australian . Retrieved 1 March 2011.

Further reading