Ahmadinejad Foes Gang Up on Websites

As protests continue on the streets of Tehran, hackers in and outside of Iran are mounting an assault on the establishment's main websites, reports ZDNet. The sites of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and several news agencies were crippled yesterday after activists flooded them with traffic. The campaign appears to have spread on Twitter, which has become one of the most reliable forms of communication during the unrest.

Similar cyberattacks took place in 2008 during the Georgia-Russia war, the same year Chinese "hacktivists" temporarily shut down CNN's website. Those attacks came from a central source, but the onslaught on Iran has come from hundreds of individuals, each reloading pages so frequently that servers eventually crash. Their goal, according to one tweet: "Overload Iran’s propaganda websites—we can do it together!" (More Iran stories.)