Nissan has taken down two of its websites after members of the Anonymous hacker collective launched DDoS attacks against the company to protest against Japan’s whale-hunting operations. Anonymous had previously hacked many targets as part of its #OpWhales and #OpKillingBay campaigns, including the government websites in Japan and Iceland, the personal website of Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe, and many other more . While most of the times the group pointed its DDoS cannons towards Japanese officials that had direct involvement in whale and dolphin killing operations, the attack on the Nissan website is a change from the group’s modus operandi. Anonymous takes new approach in #OpWhales Recently, Anonymous hackers started targeting Japanese businesses in order to have them lobby and put pressure on Japanese officials to stop whale hunting. Until now, these have been only smaller companies. Japanese television station NHK said that, during the last few months of 2015, over 100 Japanese firms were hit by DDoS attacks. All changed yesterday, when Anonymous decided to go after Japan’s second largest car manufacturer. The attacks were brutal and scared Nissan’s security staff enough to shut down the nissan.co.jp and nissan-global.com domains to prevent more dangerous intrusions. Nissan admins took down the websites after the DDoS attacks started to amp up “Because of a potential distributed denial of service attack, we are temporarily suspending service on our websites to prevent further risks,” said Nissan representatives in a statement for Agence France-Presse. The hacker that carried out the attack later commented that he didn’t breach the company’s databases and was only interested in sending a message. This message is that, despite signing international conventions to stop whale hunting, Japan is using loopholes to justify its actions as “scientific research.” At the moment of writing this article, both of Nissan’s targeted websites are still offline. Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/nissan-takes-down-website-on-its-own-after-anonymous-ddos-attack-498862.shtml

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Nissan Takes Down Website on Its Own After Anonymous DDoS Attacks