Anonymous Shuts Down Japanese Airport Website In Dolphin Protest

Hacker group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for shutting down the official website of Narita International Airport, near Tokyo, for several hours over the weekend, as part of a campaign against dolphin culling.

The website was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, in which a website is overloaded by large numbers of requests directed at it by an attacker, the airport told The Japan Times.

The site became inaccessible around 9:30pm on Friday and was restored at around 1am on Saturday, with access again becoming difficult later on Saturday morning and evening, the airport said.

Flight operations were not affected.

In a message on a Twitter account linked to Anonymous, the group said the attack was in response to Japan’s refusal to allow activist Ric O’Barry to enter the country via Narita earlier this month.

“Shut Down #Japanese Airport Website Against the detaining of @RichardOBarry,” the message read.

O’Barry is a well-known animal welfare activist and starred in a 2009 documentary about the annual slaughter of dolphins in the town of Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture.

Nissan attack

Anonymous, a loosely-organised collective of activist hackers, shut down Nissan’s global and Japanese websites earlier this month in protest against the Taiji cull. The group said it targeted Nissan during the Detroit Auto Show in order to raise awareness about the issue.

Another dolphin-themed attack targeted Icelandic government organisations’ sites last November, disabling them for about 13 hours.

Anonymous has also recently targeted white supremacist groups as well as Islamic State and its supporters and various government bodies in the US and elsewhere.

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