Digital Prank

Yesterday Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s website was compromised in protest against the Government’s new policies over Internet Censorship. Australian media reports the president’s website, www.pm.gov.au, was brought down at about 7.20pm (AEST) along with that of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, but both were back online about an hour later. It has been told that the new proposal to introduce internet filtering would block legal content, and take censorship to levels like that seen in China.

A blog post on the Inquisitor website by the hacker, known as Anonymous states that the hack was done in response to a Federal Government proposal to introduce mandatory internet filtering. The anonymous has also also posted the link which contains the list of websites on the banned content list by the Government. He has also posed a running commentary on the blog about the hack,

Tick tick tick.

Update: 7pm: and so it begins.

7:05pm (AEST), Ministers page is slow to load, but still up

7:10pm ACMA still up, but slow. The DoS isn’t working, least on the Australian end.

7:11pm weve confirmed on site (via a source) that the sites due to be attacked have been taken down from the coordination page, possibly before the raid.

7:15pm: Conroy’s pages are all up. The raid looks like it might fail.

7:18pm pm.gov.au DOWN!

7:21pm Kevin Rudd’s page is down completely. Strike one to Anonymous

7:25pm Kevin Rudd is back up.

7:27pm either Anonymous failed, or the Australian Government over prepared. Sadly the raid failed because the target sites remain up.

7:28: that’s it for our live coverage, Anonymous had failed today. They’ll learn though from this, and be more powerful next time.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s spokesman claimed that he had received reports of the hack but could not confirm whether the attack had been successful and he also said the Internet censorship is just to block illegal content. Australian Government has been conducting an internet filter test for quite a long time which is expected to be completed soon.