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.

OpDomesticTerrorism: Anonymous shut down Charlottesville city website
Image Credit: DailyProgress

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.”

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.

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:

“Our strategy relies on the unity of these direct actions (DDOS), as the ballot box is no defense against fascism and hatred, nor are the political parties in power now. We are seeing that victories we have won through hard struggle could very well be reversed. Our only chance is to build a movement that relies on the power of the people.”

Remember, NWH is the same group known for their massive DDoS attacks on HSBC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation UK). The attack was acknowledged by the bank confirming that it affected their servers on one of the most important days that is the payday.

NWH on the other hand also confirmed to HackRead.com that they are the one behind the attack on Charlottesville city website. One of the NWH’s members told us that:

“At the time we saw the police were not so helpful, they left the people to die which forced us to targeted the Charlottesville website to give them a message.”

[…]

“New World Hackers are back, and we are delivering our own version of justice to the KKK, and government, in which ever way we please.”

At the same time, YourAnonNews, one of the most prominent Anonymous Twitter handle has also Retweeted about the attack.

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Waqas

Waqas Amir is a Milan-based cybersecurity journalist with a passion for covering latest happenings in cyber security and tech world. In addition to being the founder of this website, Waqas is also into gaming, reading and investigative journalism.

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