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Hackers Shut Down Indiana's Website After Controversial Anti-Gay Law

A hacktivist group launched a brief but successful DDoS attack against the state’s official site.
​Image: frankieleon/Flickr

A group of hacktivists called YourVikingdom launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the state of Indiana's official website on Friday, successfully knocking the government's homepage offline for less than an hour, according to newsreports.

The group announced the successful attack on www.in.gov website on Twitter.

#Target http://t.co/lOxTndMW10 #OFFLINE #Vikingdom2015 #OpIndiana Knocked it down for @xxdjsethxx :) pic.twitter.com/a3TNpKPTEX

— YourVikingdom2015 (@YourVikingdom) March 27, 2015

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@IN_gov enjoy your website being #OFFLINE #Vikingdom2015

— YourVikingdom2015 (@YourVikingdom) March 27, 2015

The attack seemed to be motivated by Indiana's controversial "Religious Freedom" law, which Gov. Mike Pence signed on Thursday. The law could allow business owners to deny services to those who identify as LGBT, according to critics.

YourVigkindom wrote on Twitter that they knocked the government's website down at the request of Twitter user xxdjsethxx, who had asked Anonymous to retaliate against the state on Thursday.

This attack was probably not difficult to pull off. The group has targeted other vulnerable sites with little to no anti-DDoS protection before, CSO Online noted.

The attack was confirmed by Graig Lubsen, a spokesman for the Indiana Office of Technology.

"Indiana, like many other states, has been targeted with a denial of service interruption," he told Indy Star. "The website was not hacked. A denial of service attack consists of sending many traffic requests at the same time in order to overwhelm a website and have it not be able to load. The denial of service interruption began at approximately 2:00, but the site has not been continuously down."