Computer says no

“TICK tock tick tock”, tweeted Anonymous Africa, a group of computer hackers, on June 14th. Minutes later a website of the African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s ruling party, went offline: another victim of the oldest and crudest form of cyber-assault, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. Arbor Networks, an American security firm, counts 2,800 each day. Unlike some forms of internet mischief DDoS attacks generally are not clever or complex. They consist of floods of nuisance traffic, which slows or crashes the victims’ websites, leaving them offline, unable to send e-mail, process orders, make bank transactions or (for governments) run the country.

Teenage pranksters in the 1990s used DDoS attacks to boot enemies from internet chat rooms. Youthful mischief still accounts for many. Matthew Prince of CloudFlare, a networking firm, says attacks spike in the summer holidays. Politics and religion often fuel them too. The ANC’s attackers cited its support for Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Arab hackers who clobbered American banks between September and May wanted “The Innocence of Muslims”, a controversial video, removed from the web. Iranian military hackers may have helped—though the attacks also resembled those carried out in 2010 against PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks, a whistle-blowing group.