Activists unleash Operation Titstorm on Aussie.gov

Cyberactivists have launched an distributed denial of service attack on Australian government servers, as part of a protest against proposed anti-porn and net censorship regulations.

Operation Titstorm, launched on Wednesday, will also involve spam emails, junk faxes and prank phone calls. Spam emails will focus on small-breasted women, cartoon porn and female ejaculation - the three types of "illicit content" due to be banned.

The type of attacks and their organisation mirrors the anti-Church of Scientology protests launched by Anonymous in January 2008. Posters for the Australian attacks suggest they are also the work of Anonymous, a loose-knit collective associated with the 4chan image board, but this may be just a flag of convenience for the latest assaults. Different people may well be involved, even though the call to arms was issued on the Why We Protest forum used by Anonymous.

The attacks floored Australia's parliamentary website for around an hour on Wednesday morning, Reuters reports. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy website was also hit hard by cyber attacks. A spokesperson for Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, responsible for proposing the controversial porn filter plan decried the attacks as "irresponsible".

Meanwhile some Australian anti-censorship groups have complained that the resort to criminal hacking attacks only hurts their cause. This criticism echoes that made by long-standing opponents of Scientology at the time of attacks on the church last year, in response to its legal attempts to purge an infamous Tom Cruise church awards ceremony video from the web. ®