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Atheists Fall Victim to Cyber Attack

by Amar Toor on October 22, 2009 at 04:15 PM


Months before the Global Atheists Convention is held in Melbourne this March, a couple of major atheist Web sites have been forced to shut down due to coordinated, denial-of-service attacks. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Atheist Foundation of Australia (AFA) and the Global Atheist Convention both had their sites paralyzed by the attack, which overloaded both sites with traffic. At that point, the Global Atheists Convention had already sold over 1,000 tickets, with the AFA hailing it as the largest gathering of atheists in Australian history. Yesterday's attack, though, put a sudden stop to the sales, and, as of Thursday morning, both sites had still not yet regained full consciousness.

Authorities have not yet clarified whether the attacks were the work of religious conservatives angered at the prospect of hosting thousands of non-believing, political secularists (But given that both atheist sites were hit at the same time, it's not all that difficult to connect the dots here). The AFA has notified Australian federal police about the incident, since, as AFA president David Nicholls put it, "This may not be just an attack on atheism, but an attack on freedom of speech." Nicholls said he expects the sites to be up soon.

This past May, a 19-year-old from New Jersey orchestrated a massive online offensive against Scientology Web sites. Although his final sentence has not yet been determined, he currently faces up to 10 years in prison. Ten years might be a bit much, but it's one thing to set up a counter blog or a Web site where you can rant and rage against atheists from your own plot of cyber real estate. It's a totally different (and reprehensibly childish) thing to go so far as to sabotage someone else's site and, in so doing, muzzle a swath of the population -- even if it's only for a day. [From: The Sydney Morning Herald]

Tags: atheism, cyberattack, denial of service, DenialOfService, hack, religion, security, top

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