Australian government and businesses have been caught in the crosshairs as an Aussie fashion label draws fire from Muslim hacktivist groups.
According to Radware's new threat advisory, the fashion runway at the Melbourne Fashion Festival is stirring up some of the latest backlash from hacktivist groups.
Muslim hacktivist groups started teaming up against Australian institutions and businesses after Australian fashion house Not A Man's Dream sent garments displaying the Arabic text for 'Allah' printed on them down the catwalk during the festival. In retaliation, hacktivist crews — including Team Insane pk, Eagle Cyber, and Mysterious Team — launched a denial-of-service and website defacement campaign, targeting well over 70 Australian sites.
This includes the public websites of governments, ports, banks and private businesses.
For example, Mysterious Team claimed they took the websites of the Australian Police and the Citizen Emergency Health Service offline. At the same time, Team Insane went after IMB Bank and Bank of Sydney and continued the attack on Not A Man's Dream.
Muslim hacktivists are well connected and have a large circle of influence. The Australian attacks, which are running under the operation tags #OpsAustralia and #Opsjentik, were motivated by religion, a very common hacktivist motivation.
Pascal Geenens, Radware's director of threat intelligence, provides some additional insights:
"Denial-of-service has always been an important tactic for hacktivist groups, and this will not change any time soon. Any organisation, independent of size and vertical, can become a target of hacktivists as the fallout in Australia has demonstrated. A fashion label made an offensive statement while governments, ports, banks and several smaller businesses paid the bill.
"There is no reason for panic, but organisations need to be prepared. It is widely known in the security community that disrupting or impacting an organisation or infrastructure requires more perseverance than skills or sophistication."
Attached is today's full advisory, which includes a list of the targeted Australian websites. F
