Cyberattack Hits TMT and State Government Websites

UPDATED: Operation Green Rights, a self-described faction of the hacker group Anonymous, took credit for hacking TMT’s and Hawaii state government’s websites.

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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.”

TMT website down

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:

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. David Ige announcing TMT’s decision to delay construction.

Read past Civil Beat coverage here.

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