Operation Titstorm

Summary

In February 2010, the hacktivist group Anonymous launched Operation Titstorm, a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Australian government websites in protest of proposed internet censorship regulations. The attacks rendered the Australian Parliament House website inaccessible for three days and disrupted access to multiple government services, accompanied by email spam, junk faxes, and prank phone calls to government offices.

What Happened

Australian Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy had proposed regulations requiring internet service providers to block Australian users from accessing illegal and "unwanted" content, primarily targeting pornographic material. In response, Anonymous coordinated a large-scale DDoS attack beginning at 8pm AEST on 10 February 2010.

The attack generated up to 7.5 million requests per second, overwhelming government web servers. The Australian Parliament House website was rendered completely inaccessible for approximately three days. The Prime Minister's website, the Communications Department website, and other government online services experienced intermittent outages on 10 and 11 February.

The Department of Defence's Cyber Security Operations Centre had discovered the planned attack on 5 February, but government systems were still overwhelmed when the attack commenced. The scale of the attack was estimated to involve hundreds to thousands of compromised systems participating in the distributed attack.

Impact on Individuals

Unlike data breaches, this DDoS attack did not compromise personal information or steal data. The impact was primarily on service availability—Australian citizens and businesses were unable to access government websites and online services during the attack period. Parliamentary operations and public communication channels were disrupted.

Government offices were also flooded with harassing emails containing pornographic content, junk faxes, and prank phone calls as part of the coordinated protest action.

Organisational Response

The Communications Department acknowledged that hackers had not infiltrated government security systems but had instead swamped servers with excessive traffic. Government IT teams worked to restore services during the attack period.

On 20 February 2010, Anonymous coordinated a second phase called "Project Freeweb" consisting of physical protests outside Parliament House in Canberra and in major cities throughout Australia. The group differentiated this phase from the earlier cyberattacks in response to criticism that DDoS attacks were counterproductive to anti-censorship advocacy.

The Systems Administrators Guild of Australia condemned the DDoS attacks, stating they were the wrong way to express disagreement with the proposed law. Anti-censorship advocacy groups also criticised the attacks, arguing they damaged the broader movement against internet filtering.

The proposed mandatory internet filtering scheme was ultimately abandoned by the Australian government in 2012.