Cyberattack Hits TMT and State Government Websites – Honolulu Civil Beat

Updated 9:45 p.m., 4/26/2015

Hawaii state government’s official website went down Sunday, along with the main site for the organization building the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea. A group of hackers associated with Anonymous took credit for the cyberattack that began at 9:21 a.m. and lasted for several hours.

Update TMT spokeswoman Caroline Witherspoon confirmed that the organization’s website suffered a denial of service attack that caused the server to be unavailable for two hours. The website came back online by 3 p.m. and the organization is investigating the incident.

The state’s website, hawaii.gov, was back up and running by 5 p.m. Gov. David Ige’s communications director, Cindy McMillan, said the Security Operation Center is investigating the incident.

Operation Green Rights, a self-described faction of the hacker group Anonymous, took responsibility Sunday for the attack in a blog post titled “Anonymous with the Hawaiian natives against #TMT.”

The TMT website went down Sunday after a denial of service attack.

Screenshot

“Nothing will ever justify the destruction of ecosystems; filthy money can never replace them,” the post said.

The group first announced the attack via Twitter at 9:21 a.m. Sunday:

#DDoS against site of #Hawaii government https://t.co/tlqkwaOBSL
STOP ecocide and native rights abuses #WeAreMaunaKea pic.twitter.com/Oh1MOq9Y5N

— Anonymous (@OpGreenRights) April 26, 2015

Hawaii government officials and TMT have been under fire for moving forward with plans to build a huge telescope atop Mauna Kea, a sacred site to many Native Hawaiians.

Protests over the project, which went through seven years of approvals before breaking ground, have mounted over the past two months, resulting in Gov.