Anonymous tweet warned of Japan airport website attacks
CRIME OCT. 18, 2015 - 06:15AM JST
NAGOYA — A tweet claiming to come from Anonymous, a diffuse international collective of online hacker activists, warned of cyberattacks on the websites of major Japanese airports just one day before the web pages of Narita and Chubu airports were struck down earlier this month, police sources said Saturday.
On Oct 10, the website of Narita airport near Tokyo became inaccessible for about eight hours from around 2:30 a.m. after being overwhelmed by multiple-source traffic, while at the same time the site of Chubu airport in central Japan also became difficult to access for eight and a half hours.
Flight operations at the airports were not affected in either case.
According to investigative sources from the Chiba and Aichi prefectural police, the Twitter post on Oct 9 said attacks would be made on two major Japanese airports and displayed the addresses of Narita and Chubu airports.
The sources said the websites of the two airports apparently had what is technically called “distributed denial of service” or DDoS attacks, which are intended to paralyze a targeted website by overwhelming it with much higher than normal levels of traffic sent from multiple network sources.
In a related incident, the website of the town of Taiji in western Japan had a similar cyberattack in September, which police suspect was made by Anonymous in protest of the town’s longtime practice of drive hunting of dolphins, in which the mammals are killed or captured after being herded into a cove.
