Australian Atheist websites knocked out by DOS attack

Somebody doesn’t like Australia’s atheists. Two websites, the Atheist Foundation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention, were both knocked out in major cyber attacks yesterday and were still offline today.

The attack has been reported to the Australian Federal Police. Theories at this stage are that the Global Atheist Convention, which is to be held in March next year, is the main reason for the attack. Attending the convention will be Richard Dawkins, a high profile atheist and author of The God Delusion. The Atheist Foundation of Australia is very under-whelmed by what it considers an attack on is freedom of speech. The attacks also do constitute an offence on the basis of the damage to their business operations. The physical effect on the atheist sites has been to prevent ticket sales. The attacks had some firepower, starting at 500MBps and cranking up to 1GBps. Denial Of Service attacks are designed to shut down operations by swamping the server with data. 1 GB per second is something like a benchmark standard for DOS attacks. According to Australia’s ZD Net, it took out the data centre and the supplier was affected upstream. Atheism isn’t a major social issue in Australia, so the attacks are quite a surprise. Australia’s religious element is by any standards very middle class, well short of psychotic, and happy to stay that way. The nearest to a heated confrontation these guys do is the odd exchange of blog fire or press releases. (There aren’t even any local “usual suspects”, in this case. The nearest thing to a religious lunatic fringe in Australia are the sort of groups which consist of two people, a theoretical dog and a fire hydrant, and therefore claim to represent God. This attack is way out of their league, historically.) This attack is unlikely to make those responsible too popular with anyone. Fanatics of all persuasions are generally considered ratbags (nutcases) in Australia, particularly by major religious groups, and any appearance of acting “in their name” won’t be appreciated.