Anonymous blasts Government sites for second day

Hackers continued to bombard the Australian Parliament House website with traffic for a second straight day as part of Operation Titstorm.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General's department confirmed the attack "continued to affect the availability of the Parliament House website.

"Visitors to this site are receiving an error message stating that the service is unavailable," the spokesman said.

The Partyvan wiki, which carried a large amount of information on the attack, was updated to carry the message: "This raid is currently in progress, grab yourselves a LOIC.EXE and get on IRC for raid coordination."

LOIC - which stood for low orbit ion cannon - was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) client made by Praetox.

The main wiki page did not appear to load but was viewable via Google cache at the time of publication.

The Attorney-General spokesman said that agencies identified as potential targets in the attacks - which have been attributed to a loose collection of hackers known as ‘Anonymous' - had been "briefed in advance and were provided with suggested mitigation strategies".

It remained unclear how far in advance the Government had known of the attack.

The attack has been condemned on almost all fronts.

Moderators of the Why We Protest online activism forum, added their voice overnight.

"We don't like the censorship from Australia, but we don't condone the ddos attack from other portions of anonymous," the post read.

Electronic Frontiers Australia "naturally" condemned the attacks.

"Not only are they illegal, but they damage the cause by playing to stereotypes of filter opponents as juveniles motivated by a desire to keep the Internet safe for porn," the EFA said.

"It's true that the censorship plan has been thrust on the Australian public without consultation, research or a coherent policy objective.

"But this campaign just serves for Anonymous members to get a little revenge. It certainly won't persuade anyone; rather, it will hurt the anti-filtering campaign."

Stop Internet Censorship co-founder Nicholas Perkins agreed: "It would be much more helpful for these people to put their efforts behind legitimate action to stop this ineffective and inefficient attempt at censorship by the Australian Government."

But not everyone was critical. A Facebook page that sought support for the attacks had 91 members at the time of publication.