Protect Marriage Website Still Under Attack

Protect Marriage Website Still Under Attack

The Protect Marriage website www.protectmarriage.org.nz suffered another major attack by hackers, just a few days after the same-sex marriage bill was passed.
 
“At about 9pm Sunday night the Protect Marriage website was attacked, causing our webhost to remove the site from the web. This is no ordinary webhost - we are using a host in the US that specialises in hosting websites that are likely to be attacked. The attack was a "Denial of Service" attack whereby the attackers send large numbers of requests for information, overloading the site. In layman's terms, the equivalent of 1 DVD worth of information was being requested per second from the Protect Marriage website,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ and co-ordinator of the Protect Marriage campaign.
 
“We assume there is still opposition to our website for a number of reasons. We know that campaigns around the world seeking to protect marriage are benefitting from the resources on our site. We are also still having families sign up through the site to register their support and to be kept informed of the consequences of the bill being passed. And the ‘My Marriage Pledge’ website (www.mymarriagepledge.org.nz) linked to the Protect Marriage website has registered close to 25,000 pledges already and will continue to receive pledges for the next 15 months.”
 
This is not the first major attack on the website. The website crashed on its first day in July 2012 after huge amounts of traffic through the site, and then a ‘large scale denial of service attack’. A death threat was also received through the site which was referred to the Police.
 
“It is disappointing that some opponents on our stance towards marriage are resorting to desperate – but failed - attempts to shut us down. We were also disappointed that our original web host company based in Christchurch was targeted with offensive emails simply because they were a business that we wanted to support and who were willing to host some of our websites,” says Mr McCoskrie.
 
“We expect the Protect Marriage website to operate for a few years yet as the full impact of the law takes effect and as new attempts are made to redefine marriage even further to allow polygamy and group marriage.”
 
The site is now back online.
Technical details:
Attack Type: MAX UDP     Max Mbit/sec: 21.7Gbps    Max Packet/sec: 28187k

ENDS

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