Anonymous Hackers Take Down Japanese Prime Minister Website in Protest of Whaling

The hacktivist group known as Anonymous is at it again; they have demonstrated their strong-hand once again by taking down the Prime Minister of Japan's official website through a series of highly coordinated DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

As we have reported on many other occasions, the Anonymous hacker group is known for their activities of attacking entities they do not agree with or have some qualm over. In the latest attack to take down the Japanese Prime Minister website, Anonymous is actively protesting against the countries whale hunting operations.

Japan has long been known for whale and dolphin hunting, which has been a hot topic and disagreement among animal rights organizations around the world. Whaling has been banned worldwide for over 30 years, but certain areas around Japan utilize loopholes in international law to do it for "scientific research." Anonymous, for obvious reasons, doesn't quite agree with those practices. As a result, the hacker group waged an aggressive DDoS attack on the Japanese Prime Minister's official website, which ended up taking the site down.

DDoS attacks, which involves flooding a web server with so much concentrated traffic that it eventually crashes and is no longer able to serve website content, are commonly used among hacker groups. In the case of Anonymous using a DDoS attack against the servers hosting Japan's Prime Minister website, connection timeout errors and notifications were what those saw when attempting to visit the site after the attack.

We reported on other instances where Anonymous took action against those that they had a strong animosity towards. A prime example was the recent rash of threats and attacks on ISIS Twitter accounts after the Paris bombings. Anonymous' actions are still taking place to bring chaos on ISIS' presence on the internet.

In the light of Anonymous' drive to put a stop to whaling in Japan, the recent DDoS attack on the Japanese PM website is one of many previous efforts to battle the cruel activities. A campaign dubbed the #OpKillingBay has been around for about two years now in an effort to raise awareness of Japan's whale and dolphin hunting practices.

As an expansion of the #OpKillingBay campaign, Anonymous was successful in their takedown of the Japanese PM and have now targeted other entities, including other government websites in Japan, to make their opposing message known throughout the country and around the world.