Iran: Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime

More on the web-fueled uprising in Iran, where many are expressing outrage over presumed electoral fraud in the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. From Noah Shachtman at Wired:

While demonstrators gather in the streets to contest Iran's rigged election, online backers of the so-called "Green Revolution" are looking to strike back at the Tehran regime — by attacking the government's websites.

Pro-democracy activists on the web are asking supporters to use relatively simple hacking tools to flood the regime's propaganda sites with junk traffic. "NOTE to HACKERS – attack www.farhang.gov.ir – pls try to hack all iran gov wesites [sic]. very difficult for us," Tweets one activist. The impact of these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks isn't clear. But official online outlets like leader.ir, ahmadinejad.ir, and iribnews.ir are currently inaccessible. "There are calls to use an even more sophisticated tool called BWraep, which seems to exhaust the target website out of bandwidth by creating bogus requests for serving images," notes Open Society Institute fellow Evgeny Morozov.

Activists Launch Hack Attacks on Tehran Regime (Wired Danger Room)