OTTAWA, Nov. 25 (UPI) -- Government websites in Toronto and the Canadian capital of Ottawa have been disrupted by a string of cyber attacks.
The websites of Canada's Parliament and Supreme Court, the city of Ottawa, and the Ottawa and Toronto police have occasionally, this week, been overtaken by the image of a cartoon banana or an error message. The disruptions were traced to an individual or group using the name "Aerith" on a Twitter account, in support of an Ottawa teenager, unidentified according to Canadian law, who was charged with 60 criminal counts pertaining to making hoax phone calls across North America.
The Toronto police said Tuesday its website was restored after it was the victim of a Distributed Denial of Service, in which the website was overloaded with access requests. A Twitter user, whose account is named @AerithTOR and based in Turkey, claimed responsibility for the attack. The same user claimed responsibility for crashing the other websites.
Aerith also posted, on Ottawa's municipal website, statements denouncing the city's police, as well as personal information about Ottawa's police chief and the lead investigator in the phone hoax case.
The websites experienced intermittent outages over the weekend, the Supreme Court announcing its website was shut down as a preventive measure. The Toronto Police website was taken offline Sunday and restored Monday.
Although the spokesman for Aerith claimed the instigator is connected to the hacking syndicate Anonymous, an analyst suggested other hackers would offer gestures of solidarity if it were the case.
"This is not what happened here," Gabriella Coleman, a professor at Montreal's McGill University who studies hacking groups, told the New York Times. "He doesn't seem to have gained any kind of support from existing groups."
