Well, we could have seen this coming: Anonymous, the nebulous, ruthless hive mind whose members frequent 4chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and a number of other online hubs, is launching a large-scale attack on the Australian government over stringent anti-pornography measures that the government has proposed.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has called for a mandatory ISP filter on all of Australia, which would block, among other things, pornography depicting cartoon characters, female ejaculation, and even small-breasted women.
Anonymous being Anonymous, they’ve responded with what they call “Operation Titstorm,” targeting several government websites with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and blasting government officials with the very types of pornography proposed to be filtered. The official site for the Australian Parliament is currently down due to the attacks.
The denial of service attacks began at 8am Australian Time Wednesday morning (5pm Eastern Time Tuesday night) and targeted the Australian government’s main website as well as the Parliament site. The plan was DDoS government servers first, and then follow up with “a s***storm” of porn-related e-mails, faxes, and prank cell phone calls to government officials, with a special focus on three types of content that has fallen under the ban: small-breasted porn, cartoon porn, and female ejaculation. (Australia’s Classification Board had previously determined female ejaculation to be a form of urination, while small-breasted women simply “appeared” to be underage.)
“The Australian government will learn that one does not mess with our porn,” Anonymous wrote in an e-mail sent to media outlets. “No one messes with our access to perfectly legal (or illegal) content for any reason.”
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Australia’s Department of Parliamentary Services confirmed with the Sydney Morning Herald that the parliament site was getting up to 7.5 million hits per second at its peak. The spokesperson said that the site was inaccessible for about an hour and then intermittent for several hours after that. A spokesperson for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy added that the attacks were “totally irresponsible” and could have denied services to the Australian public.
Parody wiki Encyclopedia Dramatica is currently featuring the anti-Australia attack on its front page. Their article on “Operation Titstorm” includes a list of Australian embassies to target, as well as what purports to be the (unsurprisingly profane) original 4chan post calling for the attack: (click to see fully-sized)
There’s also a video message to the Australian government.
What can an attack like this really accomplish? Regardless of one’s take on the Australian government’s Great Firewall Reef — and it has plenty of flaws — blowing stuff up and sending porn to government officials may not exactly the best way to enact political change or get the people you’re attacking to take you seriously. But if there’s one thing worth knowing about Anonymous, it’s that political goals often blow up into much more virulent things, and their enemies, whoever or whyever they are, had best duck and cover.
