The websites of the Department of Justice and Finance suffered a DDOS attack by Anonymous last night. The attack was orchestrated through a number of twitter accounts affiliated with the Anonymous group. Messages from these accounts urged followers to engage in a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack on the justice.ie and finance.gov.ie websites.

The reasoning behind these recent attacks are in response to the governments plans to reform the Irish copyright law, which is said to be the “Irish SOPA”.

It is also understood that the website of Sean Sherlock, who has proposed the law reform, is to come under attack at some stage today. An Irish supporter of Anonymous can be seen below tweeting the website to the group, along with a recommendation to add the website state.ie to the list of targets, which he later realised was not a government affiliated website.

Gardai have been handed over logs and other evidence to investigate the recent attacks on the CAO website which has caused chaos for students this week.  The website was attacked just 10 minutes after the release of first round offers on the site at 6am Monday morning. The site was subsequently attacked on Wednesday by manipulating the forgotten password link which reissued new passwords to 22,000 students.

Denial of Service attacks  can be difficult but not impossible to pinpoint. Usually these attacks are perpetrated by criminal gangs looking to extort money from online websites such as bookies. The attack on the CAO however was purely to cause havoc.

Depending on the severity of the attack on Monday some simple security protocols in place may have averted the whole disaster. According to a leading IT Security firm allowing passwords to be sent out by simply inputting a CAO number would be considered ridiculous for such a high profile website and the CAO really needs to look into better coding practices on it’s website.

Thousands of students have faced massive disruption due to these recent attacks.