Sun Yang war with Australia spills into cyberspace as hacker fans are blamed for taking down country’s first online census
‘It’s not out of left-field’ says cyber security expert of a theory being floated in Australia to explain debacle
Chinese swimmer Sun Yang’s rivalry with Australia’s Mack Horton has spilled out of the pool at these Olympics, sparking angry words from rival fans and media in both countries.
Now Australians are wondering if a cyber-attack that took down the country’s first attempt to conduct an online census is the latest front in this sporting war.
And elsewhere online, the website of Swimming Australia was operating in ‘under attack’ mode after also seemingly being hit.
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics, which conducts the census, finally got its website back online on Thursday after it was out of action for 43 hours because of cyber-attacks.
And a cyber-security expert in Australia said “it’s not way out of left field [as a motivation]” that Sun’s fans – angry over Horton’s repeated claims that the Chinese swimmer is a drug cheat – could have been behind it.
Suelette Dreyfuss made the claim in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald. She said the DDoS attack – where a website is swamped with traffic from ‘bots’ to take down the server – seemed too “noisy” and unsubtle to be the work of professionals.