New Zealand Parliament denies DDoS attack

Updated: Anonymous claims responsibility for site outages over the weekend

The New Zealand Government has denied reports of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against the New Zealand Parliament website over the weekend, despite cyber activist group Anonymous claiming responsibility for outages.

NZ Parliament general manager, Geoff Thorn, said the website had had a “minor outage” early on Monday morning which it had identified as an issue with its server.

“Apart from that, it’s been up the whole time,” he told Computerworld Australia. “We haven’t had a problem here and certainly nothing that I’m aware of.”

According to Thorn, the Parliament office received threats to the website on a regular basis.

Despite Thorn’s denial, the Anonymous group this week claimed responsibility for outages to the website as one of several DDoS attacks it has made against government and corporate websites over past month. On Tuesday the group posted a video which threatened direct action against the Federal Government.

The group has specifically voiced protest over file sharing laws passed by the government last month, taking offence to elements that threaten to deactivate the internet accounts of repeat copyright infringers for six months, and pay a $NZ15,000 fine. An unidentified Anonymous spokesperson said in the video that the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill was an example of “guilty until proven innocent”.

“We have been watching the actions taken by you and your legislation and the passing of the infringing file sharing is both a form of censorship and invasion of privacy,” the spokesperson said.

“Anonymous will not let this go by unnoticed.”

The bill would pass into law on 1 September this year.

Following the revealing of Anonymous’ claims, Thorn refused to further comment on any "particular incident we may or may not have had".

"IT services are always at risk, this is the reason we all use firewalls," he said.

Anonymous, which has no identifiable member structure, has targeted multiple groups for different actions, recently including attacks on Sony after the global entertainment giant sued developers GeoHot and Graf_Chokolo for successfully jailbreaking the PlayStation 3's firmware.

Got a security tip-off? Contact Hamish Barwick at hamish_barwick at idg.com.au

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

More about: Bill, Federal Government, Sony
References show all

Comments

1

dondilly

Wed 04/05/2011 - 00:07

NZ politicians in what passed for a debate have already shown their technical incompetence and thanks to wikileaks evidence the corruption of the NZ political system where they put the interests of US corporates ahead of the interests of the people who elected them by passing law that would be unconstitutional in their own country.

Now reading this report, they are Liars too.

2

James

Wed 04/05/2011 - 23:30

I just checked, the parliament at new zealand seems to be down. NZfact.com seems to be down too. Seems like they are lying.

3

David Davidson

Wed 04/05/2011 - 23:32

I may question their methods, but I don't doubt their intentions. Anonymous has done more for freedom of Information than any politician ever has. I fully support them.

4

Anon

Thu 05/05/2011 - 03:59

This is a 100% lie.

5

Anonomyous

Thu 05/05/2011 - 06:41

Oh yeah, it was just a coincidence that the site went down the day Anonymous was DDoSing it.

6

Yoooo

Fri 06/05/2011 - 04:41

Anonymous is ddosing NZ Parliament

7

anonymouse

Fri 06/05/2011 - 07:18

anyone with half a brain can see the NZ government are lying.

anon initiated the DDoSing, and the website becomes completely inaccessable. that's not just a coincidence.

so not only are they bringing in unfair and undemocratic laws, but they're also barefaced liars too.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the Computerworld comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: anonymous, distributed denial of service (DDoS), New Zealand, New Zealand Parliament
Whitepapers
All whitepapers
Sign up now to get free exclusive access to reports, research and invitation only events.
Featured Download
/downloads/product/14/gimp/

GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP)

When you think Open Source software, you may think of half-baked programs too hard to use, or perhaps lacking power. Well, think again. This Open ...

Computerworld newsletter

Join the most dedicated community for IT managers, leaders and professionals in Australia