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David Heath
Thursday, 10 September 2009 09:20
IT Policy - Government Tech Policy
Last night's attack on the Federal Government's websites was a fizzer, but somewhere along the line, the attacker was attacked.Dire threats of DDoS attack and other electronic harassment of Federal Government websites and fax numbers were reported yesterday.
Reports today in various mainstream media outlets suggest a variety of tales of woe, mostly conflicting! Overall however, very little happened. For instance, well-known IT observer Duncan Riley wrote a short diary while monitoring various government sites last night, finding little of interest aside from a seven-minute interruption to the Prime Minister's site.
One wonders if the interruption was due to an excessive number of journalists and bloggers hitting the site to check that it was alive.
A spokeswoman from the Attorney general's Department confirmed that the Prime Minister's website was briefly unavailable just after 7pm last night.
The spokeswoman said, "I can confirm that the Prime Minister's website was unavailable for a short time shortly after 7pm on 9 September 2009. Visitors to the site received an error message stating that the service was unavailable. The attack took the form of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) designed only to disrupt access to the website, conducted by a group calling itself 'Anonymous'. There was no unauthorised access to the website's infrastructure.
"Relevant Australian Government agencies worked with Internet service providers to ensure that the site was restored."
Having been warned of the attack, the spokeswoman noted that "The Cyber Security Operations Centre (in the Defence Signals Directorate) is providing IT security advisers (ITSAs) in each of the targetted Australian Government agencies with assistance to monitor and respond to the threat. Agencies are working with their Internet service providers (ISPs) to respond to any attacks."
Due to ongoing enquiries, the spokeswomen declined to comment further except to note that "individuals who become involved in these types of cyber attacks need to be aware that they are committing an illegal act."
She finally observed that contrary to a variety of media reports, no other government sites were affected by the incident.
Sen. Stephen Conroy Minister for Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy described the attacks as "juvenile" and further observed that "This campaign is completely misinformed and erroneous. The Government is examining the introduction of ISP level filtering for Refused Classification material, as identified under the National Classification Scheme, such as child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality and sexual violence.
"A trial is expected to be completed shortly with a report to be provided to the Minister following its conclusion."
As a final aside, and to prove "there is no honour amongst thieves," yesterday's report on iTWire included a link (now removed) to the 'manifesto' for this Operation Didgeridie. Today that manifesto site has been replaced with a slew of hard-core porn.
Go figure.
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