The online hacktivist group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for carrying out a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the official website of Charlottesville city Virginia. The attack was conducted under the banner of OpDomesticTerrorism; as a result, the website has been forced to go offline.
The motive behind this DDoS attack was to protest against the hit and run incident in which a number of activists were hit while protesting against the rally organized by a group of white supremacists just a couple of hours ago.
The video of the incident was recorded by Brennan Gilmore who tweeted that “Video of car hitting anti-racist protestors. Let there be no confusion: this was deliberate terrorism. My prayers with victims. Stay home.”
https://twitter.com/brennanmgilmore/status/896434516260212737
The DailyProgress reported that mayor of the city Mike Signer has confirmed that one person has died in the incident after a car plowed into a mass of Unite the Right counter-protesters.
Soon after the deadly incident, Anonymous hacktivist conducted a series of DDoS attacks on the Charlottesville city website and successfully took it offline.
TangoDown https://t.co/NF5HMgffYN #offline #OpDomesticTerrorism #DefendCville pic.twitter.com/rSriOHONnY
— Anonymous (@YourAnonGlobal) August 12, 2017
TangoDown https://t.co/qIg9eBKoM1 #offline #OpDomesticTerrorism #DefendCville https://t.co/55DPKM1ZYr
— ÐΓξ∀MξΓ8F↑νξ (@dreamer8five) August 12, 2017
Here are a few screenshots showing the site is down. Isitdownrightnow, a platform that keeps an eye on the sites suffering cyber attack or outage has also confirmed that the site is down.
At the time of publishing this article, the targeted website was down. However, for some users, the home page was loading at a slow speed.
Update / 5:04 PM, Sunday, August 13, 2017 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)
In a detailed conversation with a prominent Anonymous Twitter handle @YourAnonGlobal, HackRead.com was told that the attack on Charlottesville city website was carried out by New World Hackers (NWH), a counterpart of Anonymous hacktivist group.
Explaining their manifesto on this attack; @YourAnonGlobal stated that: