Ahmadinejad Foes Gang Up on Websites

'Hacktivists' overload president's blog, other government outlets
By Jason Farago,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 16, 2009 7:38 AM CDT
Ahmadinejad Foes Gang Up on Websites
Iranian supporters of presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi attend a protest near the Iranian embassy in Ankara, Turkey, Monday, June 15, 2009.   (AP Photo/Burhan Ozbilici)

As protests continue on the streets of Tehran, hackers in and outside of Iran are mounting an assault on the establishment's main websites, reports ZDNet. The sites of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several news agencies were crippled yesterday after activists flooded them with traffic. The campaign appears to have spread on Twitter, which has become one of the most reliable forms of communication during the unrest.

Similar cyberattacks took place in 2008 during the Georgia-Russia war, the same year Chinese "hacktivists" temporarily shut down CNN's website. Those attacks came from a central source, but the onslaught on Iran has come from hundreds of individuals, each reloading pages so frequently that servers eventually crash. Their goal, according to one tweet: "Overload Iran’s propaganda websites—we can do it together!" (More Iran stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X