The International Women’s Day Web site was bombarded with a distributed denial-of-service attack for most of March 8.
Let’s break that statement down a bit. March 8 was International Women’s Day, and 2011 marked its 100th anniversary. IWD had predicted the biggest celebration ever, with over 2,000 events happening throughout the world organized by women’s groups, charities, governments, corporations, schools, universities and the media. There were also a number of IWD events online.
Nothing controversial, nothing political. Just a day celebrating women.
Howver, some hackers apparently had some problems with that because a large DDOS attack hit the International Women’s Day Web site shortly after midnight in the Asia/Pacific region “in an explicit attempt to prevent users from accessing the global hub,” IWD organizers said.
The site was the target of a number of massive 5 gigabytes per second (Gbps) denial of service attacks.
While the first attack was countered about an hour later, a second major attack struck the site as “Europe was waking.” After service was restored three hours later, a third attack hit the site again, keeping the site under attack for most of the day, according to the IWD.
“We are monitoring the attack but women’s spirits will not be dampened by the attempts of those who do not support International Women’s Day,” said Glenda Stone, founder of the IWD Web site.
Hackers had nothing better than to attack a site that celebrated women’s achievements and to mark existing campaign for greater equality? For shame.