Several websites connected to the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi have recently been heavily targeted by hacker attacks.
From the evening of Tuesday, June 21, “Anonymous”, an international group of hackers has been targeting the websites pdl.it, governoberlusconi.it, forzasilvio.it and silvioberlusconifansclub.org, and has been successful in making them inaccessible to users.
The attack, called “Operation Bunga Bunga”, was announced on Friday morning by the Italian wing of Anonymous, which later claimed responsibility for the action on its website. According to their claim, this hacker attack should be interpreted as a symbolic act of protest by citizens against Silvio Berlusconi’s political activity and public conduct.
This international hacker group is already well known for its recent attacks on the websites of Visa, Mastercard and Paypal triggered by the refusal on the part of these companies to deliver user donations to Wikileaks made through their services.
This type of attack is based on saturating the target website with external communication requests from large numbers of computers, with the aim of making it unavailable to users. These attacks can be carried out by the concerted efforts of large numbers of users or by a botnet, a network of computers infected with malware and controlled remotely without the owner’s knowledge.
Following the success of the attack on websites connected to the Prime Minister, Anonymous launched a new operation on the afternoon of June 22 inviting citizens to take part in a new attack against the websites of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, the Italian Government and the Italian Senate. However, according to parliamentary sources, it seems that these websites have so far been able to resist attack.
The news of the attack was reported in the major Italian dailies, many of which have published excerpts from the protest manifesto of the Anonymous group.
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